


c:\mortem_obire.exe

by LaceLich



Category: Bleach
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Communication Failure, Computer Programming, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, For Want of a Nail, Google Translation Failure, Immortality, NaNoWriMo, NaNoWriMo 2016, On Hiatus, Original Character Death(s), Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Plans For The Future, Poor Life Choices, Realistic, Scheming, Self-Insert, Temporary Character Death, Worldbuilding, how to make friends and influence people
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-03
Updated: 2016-11-28
Packaged: 2018-08-28 19:23:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 50,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8460031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaceLich/pseuds/LaceLich
Summary: In which one woman is stranded on the other side of known reality in a place where the natural laws that govern no longer make sense.
When all you have to survive the machinations of every known evil is the staggeringly useless ability to fail at dying properly, does it even count as survival? Welcome to the world of Bleach little girl, the deck is stacked against you.





	1. DROP CONSTRAINT primary_LOCALE

**Author's Note:**

> So, on a dare from a friend of mine, major fandom time. Have I ever written for Bleach? Nope. Have I probably over-reached by doing Bleach for Nano? Yup. Most definitely have.

There was a story, old as the mountains and almost as dry, of a man who strayed from his proper path to engage in something normal with something impossible. This man took many names and many forms, but in the man turned around to go home and found that everything had changed while he was away. His family was long dead or forgotten, his town turned to dust, and everything he had ever known had changed.

There was a story of a man who fell in love with a woman, or a woman who fell in love with a man, and went away to a land of impossible things to live out the end of their days. And for a time everything would be wonderful… until one of them would want to go home. And so the other half would bring them something normal and send them on their way with a promise and a smile.

The world was always changed when they got back.

In every world there exists a series of liminal spaces, places in the world that exist solely in the moments between one place and the next. These are the places where the laws of the world are placed on hold, where time and space have no meaning and the only thing that matters is that singular moment. Highway rest stops, dark tunnels to nowhere under bridges, hospital floors that can only be accessed by special tricks, the list goes on and on.

This is the story of a woman who fell asleep in a liminal space and woke up somewhere else entirely.

 

\----------

 

She fell asleep on the train.

Now, she would be the first person to admit that she really hadn’t _meant to,_ but the trip had promised to be nineteen hours of nothing but sitting in the same spot and letting the train’s vibrations numb every point of contact with the seat. She ran out of things to do alarmingly early into the journey and hadn’t wanted to pull out any sort of electrical device, lest the light from her screen disturb the screaming baby that had finally managed to fall asleep.

The woman on the train had prayed for patience from whatever god was listening. And for lack of anything better to do, she had allowed the train to lull her to sleep.

There were less and less passengers on the train each time she woke up from her restless slumber. Each time she would open her eyes and stare at the little numbered tag affixed to the luggage bins above her head, and each time she would glance over to the train attendant. An older gentleman, he had been the only constant on her trip so far. She didn’t know his name, nor he hers. But each time she would meet his eyes as the other passengers shuffled to their luggage, he would shake his head at her and mouth that it was fine for her to go back to sleep.

The baby got off the train on the third stop, and the attendant tapped her shoulder as everyone else on the car seemed to disembark.

He smiled warmly at her, a grandfatherly air about him that made her tug the earbuds from her ears and groggily snap to attention. “Ma’am, would you care to stretch your legs for a bit? The train won’t be leaving the station for another fifteen minutes.”

Numb fingers tapped at the screen of her phone to put her playlist on pause, and she yawned behind her hand. Nodding dumbly, she made an aborted move towards her bags. “Uh… sure.”

The man silenced her with a nonchalant wave of his hand. “Oh honey, go on. You can leave your things here and I’ll watch them. Go on now, go stretch those legs out.” He shooed her off the train and she couldn’t help but laugh nervously as she made her careful way down the stairs.

Her legs felt like overdone pasta, sore and cramped from her napping. She made her tottering way to the brick pavement of the train station proper, rubbed at her fingers in the somehow chillier air. It was strange how quiet it was, breath clouding in front of her face as she dug in the pocket of her long pea coat for her cigarettes, shaking fingers fumbling to flick her lighter into life. There were barely any other souls out by the train, and they huddled together in little groups she had no part of.

The woman travelled alone, and she paced slowly to work the kinks out of her wobbling legs even as she marked the time by the slow crawl of ash flicking from her cigarette. With no wind to ruffle at her curly brown hair, nor bright sunlight to burn at her brown eyes, the day could be considered pleasant if it wasn’t for the unseasonal chill that seemed to soak into her bones with each breath she took.

When she was finished, she snuffed out the remains of her cigarette against the bottom of her boot and rubbed it between her fingers until she was sure the ember was long gone. Carefully she tossed it into the trash can at the top of the stairs as she climbed back into the upper level of the train and went to reclaim her seat with a tiny wave at the train attendant.

She settled herself back in her seat and thumbed her phone back to life, deftly plugged herself back into the dulcet tones of her looping travel playlist. The woman queued up a few more albums to download and play with a laissez faire attitude, content to let whatever connection she could snatch on the drive to pick up something new to listen to than her rather poor choice of the Frozen soundtrack and assorted snatches of random music she had picked up at the stops before.

So went her trip until at last the train carriage was empty but for the attendant and her. It was strange how no one else got on at the infrequent stops; there were plenty of people outside when she was shaken awake to stretch her legs.

Finally, the grandfatherly man shook her awake one last time. “Honey, it’s time. Are you ready?” He smiled into his beard as he pulled her bag from the overhead bin for her.

She yawned sleepily, rubbed cold fingers at her eyes as she tried to accept the bag from him. “Mhmm,” she murmured as her shoulders rose with the stretching of her arms. “It’s just a vacation for a bit.”

The attendant, who had laughed at her drowsy halfway southern manners, waved his hand at her while she cracked her back. “Oh it’s no worry honey, I just don’t want you to forget anything.”

The woman gave him a tiny smile, thin as paper. “No sir, I just have the one bag.”

He nodded at her. “You have a nice time now. I’m looking forward to hearing about it on your way back.”

She laughed at that, an honest sound that echoed through the empty carriage even after she clapped her hand over her mouth sheepishly. “Whoops, hope nobody was sleeping. But no, I’ll see you in a week sir. Hopefully I can catch up on all my reading while I’m away.”

“I hope you have fun, honey.” He handed over her bag even as he escorted her to the stairs off the carriage. “Don’t hurry back on my account. You just make sure you stay safe now. I don’t want to see you on the six o’clock news.”

She grinned, a sudden change from her previously mousey and drowsy smiles from before. “Nah. I’m boring really. Took a train halfway across the countryside just to catch up on my reading. Have a happy New Year’s, sir!”

He waved back at her as she jumped off the last stair. “You too, honey. You have a happy New Year too.”

The door closed behind her with a final click, and she shifted her suddenly far too heavy bag on her shoulder. She didn’t remember her messenger bag being quite that large or long. That had been the entire appeal of bringing it as opposed to a more conventional duffel bag. She was only going to be gone on vacation for a week, and rolling all her clothes together like she had found on that travel website had gotten her surprisingly more jammed into it than she usually managed. There had even been enough space for her to cram in her travel pillow, a blanket for the train ride itself, a few bottles of water, and even a really big bag of trail mix that she had judiciously chosen not to snack on.

Train food had been enough to tide her over until she could rendezvous with her friend for all the true fun on her trip. Namely, she was desperately looking forward to eating something that didn’t taste like cardboard and grease.

It was kind of odd that the train station didn’t have any signs on the walls in English. Maybe her friend had moved somewhere far stranger than she had anticipated. “Really funny, asshole,” she muttered under her breath as she stomped her way inside the train station. Honestly, it would be just like him to conveniently forget to tell her that all the signs were in Japanese of all things. So much for the directions he had emailed her.

She pulled her phone out of her coat pocket, fingers quickly tapping in the code and pulling up her contacts list even as she pinched the bridge of her nose to stave off the impending headache. It was the work of moments to tap to his name and let her phone ring.

“We're sorry; we are unable to complete your call as dialed. Please check the number and dial again, or call your operator to help you.”

She hung up with a scowl. “Ugh. Asshole.”

She tried again with the number his mother had given her for emergencies.

“We're sorry; we are unable to complete your call as dialed. Please check the number and dial again, or call your operator to help you.”

Well that didn’t make any sense at all. She deftly dodged the crowd of people, long practice at her antisocial habits letting her tune out their conversations and avoid being crushed under the weight of the sudden group of people rushing to the train that had pulled up at the tracks. The late December chill was somehow even more biting than it had been back home, and she didn’t think the thick wool of her peacoat would save her if she leaned up against the tiled walls.

She tried in vain several times to call or text her friend, and for some strange reason she wasn’t getting any WiFi reception in the train station proper. “Damn it.”

A shadow loomed over her, not too close to trigger any kind of reflex to punch the taller or too tall to annoy her. Life was a struggle when you were short as sin. She turned her head and had to blink back her reaction. Well. If this was how people normally wandered around this train station, she really needed to talk to her friend about why he didn’t warn her properly about the possibility of going to a convention for New Year’s. Seriously, she would have gladly combed through her closet for something awesome.

The girl in front of her waved cheerfully. And then she said something that sounded very much like it was Japanese, and the only reason the woman knew any better was because she had watched enough anime, thank you very much.

The woman stared flatly up at the girl who looked like a really high quality cosplayer of one Inoue Orihime of Bleach, and kind of wanted to ask her all sorts of questions about what she did to get a quality wig like that. Instead what came of her mouth was curt and probably just a little bit unkind. “Speak any English?” She blamed it on the cold.

One Orihime-cosplayer smiled brightly. “Not very well,” she enthused with a rather thick accent that the woman was not entirely sure was being faked.

“Uh-huh.” Well, that’s what Google Translate was for. God bless Google Translate. Sure, when you typed in came out slightly weird sometimes, but the woman was all for enabling some excellent cosplayer immersion. Thank heavens she had been that weird soul who downloaded a bundle pack of the most common languages she encountered. Quick fingers tapped out what she wanted, and she rotated the screen so the girl could see the friendly white kanji on their blue screen.

“Could you give me directions?”

She waited until the girl nodded before she made a few more taps on the screen. “Could you tell me where this is?” There, the girl could write kanji on the screen with the tip of her finger and the program would take care of the rest. Handy, if not exactly what she thought she would ever have to use it for.

Granted, the woman mostly used it for work to let her customers communicate when their English failed them and they still needed to get their shopping done, so this wasn’t really much of a stretch. And it wasn’t like she hadn’t bothered to charge her phone on the train, so she had plenty of battery power to spare.

“Empty Seat Town.”

And so on. Eventually the woman figured out that she had apparently gotten off at the entirely wrong stop altogether, and that this was in fact not all that common for this particular line. A careful lining up of her phone’s camera with the train station map had the Orihime cosplayer (who did in fact want to be called Orihime-chan) gasping over how amazing her phone’s technology was. The woman didn’t see fit to tell her that she could only do this for French, Russian, German, English, Spanish, and Japanese, as those were the only languages she had downloaded for offline use.

The train map on the wall did not match the train map on the back of her train brochure at all. This was mildly alarming. Orihime did not have a phone she could borrow on her person, but she would be happy to let her use the phone at her home if she didn’t mind a bit of a walk. As it was currently what any sane human would consider ‘ridiculously cold’ outside, the woman was entirely fine with this.

In the spirit of things, the woman had been oh so willing to play along with the immersion. So she had said her name was Nome Ranka, and that was enough. Not that the woman looked even remotely like either Ranka Lee or Sheryl Nome, but putting the divide of ‘seinen not shonen’ was always important in these sorts of matters. Plus it wasn’t like it wasn’t a pipe dream of hers to cosplay both the Galactic Fairy and the Super Dimension Cinderella at some point. It was just a dream that was trumped by her unending need to buy new video games.

Apparently ‘Nome-chan’ was going to be ‘Orihime-chan’s new best friend. That was honestly fine with the woman now called Ranka, because she was more than willing to make a random new cosplayer friend to meet up with at conventions. Sure, it was weird that an actual Japanese girl had ended up in the South of all places for it, but if that was what made her happy then so be it. Honestly, she was more confused with how it was there was so much snow on the ground when she hadn’t seen any when she had been out on any of her breaks over the last nineteen hours.

Then again, maybe this was like the time she drove through New Mexico and been snowed in for an evening due to a freak cold snap.

Either way, she was tired and it was growing dark enough that she would probably have to ask Orihime-chan if she could give her directions to a hotel that she could stay the night at.

 

\----------

 

Orihime did not want to let her go to a hotel. Apparently it was far too dark for someone to be wandering around, and Orihime would be more than happy to set out a futon for Ranka to sleep on. Considering how it was late and Ranka had spent the last two hours racking up Orihime’s phone bill with attempted international calling of all things, the odds were looking in Orihime’s favor for Ranka staying the night.

The girl went to draw a bath after their impromptu dinner of convenience store bentos and left Ranka to her thoughts.

Her name was actually Inoue Orihime, and had the nameplate, student ID, and pile of mail to match.

Once was an accident.

The town was called Karakura. A random bunch of people had been more than willing to corroborate the name after she flashed her phone at them and pointed enough times.

Twice was a coincidence.

Ranka could live with herself if it was just all coincidence. Sure, it wasn’t exactly comfortable to contemplate, but the world was weird enough without making it any stranger. There was zero reason to throw herself off into the deep end without some kind of actual proof. She fetched herself a glass of water from the kitchen, not even thinking about it when she placed her hands on the countertop to pull herself onto the surface in order to root around in Orihime’s cupboards for a glass.

Later, she would mentally slap herself for not connecting the pieces quickly enough.

Orihime returned to the living room just as Ranka finished draining the glass and placed it in the sink. She was friendly, if ditzy, and she had allowed Ranka into her apartment with not only zero fuss but zero expectations. Orihime gestured for Ranka’s cellphone, and she carefully sketched the characters on the screen until it spat out the translation. “Hey, Nome-chan, the bath is ready! Would you like some help with the bath?”

For her part, Ranka simply inclined her head and stared at the girl. She was grown enough to manage a bath on her own. Seriously, she’d managed the feat all by herself for the last twenty odd years, and she would continue that trend until she became so senile she couldn’t manage even the smallest of bodily functions without help. She didn’t need her phone to manage the baffled ‘no’ that escaped her lips, her accent in Japanese barely noticeable with the short word.

So she gathered her clothes together and pulled out her charger without thinking about it, slapped her phone down for a charge while she went to go wash away all of the grit from the train. Or at least that had been the plan.

Ranka made it all the way to the bathroom with her impromptu bundle of clothes under her arm before she realized that she probably would need help.

Everything in Karakura was bigger. Honestly she thought she was just being overly sensitive due to the inevitable travel weariness combined with her usual short complex. But as she stared at herself in the bathroom mirror, she was forced to conclude that she had been entirely wrong.

She was short, eyes wide in a child’s face, body gone prepubescent, hair longer than it had been when she put it in its usual loose ponytail that morning. Everything about her had shrunk or grown in ways she really didn’t appreciate. What had been a cute curly mohawk had been set back to what she had used to have when she was a kid, just longer as if she had never had a haircut in her life. All that hair made her look even tinier, and her chubby little cheeks were not helping any.

No wonder Orihime thought she needed help.

Three times was enemy action.

Ok. She could do this. She was grown enough to think it through. Ranka shook her head and slapped her cheeks lightly to focus herself on the issue at hand.

Her hair tie snapped, the elastic finally defeated by the sheer weight and volume of her curls. Well… shit. Her hair brushed against the backs of her ankles, and that would just not do. Ranka was zero percent prepared to attempt to deal with all of that hair on her head, no thank you. So she turned around and made a swift retreat to the living room where her phone was still plugged in, bare feet slapping against the floor as she stomped over.

“Scissors please,” she typed, letting the mechanical voice of her phone do the dirty work for her. There was no way in any level of Hell that she was going to be able to tolerate having that much hair on her head, let alone figure out how she was supposed to take care of it.

The scissors were not forthcoming.

What she got instead was gentle hands on her shoulders guiding her to the bathroom, and even gentler hands helping her wash her hair.

It was kind of nice having Orihime babble behind her, not that she could understand what the girl was saying. As far as she could tell, from her hours of far too much binge watching anime, the other girl was happy that ‘Ranka’ had decided to spend the night something something little sister something something bath something something. Really she didn’t care to pay attention.

Instead she was focused on the hair on her toes.

She used to have hair on her big toe. A little patch of thin black hairs that had only started growing after she hit puberty. They were gone now. Probably in the same place that her breasts, dignity, identity, and tattoos went. But it was too late to mourn them now. She was committed.

She was a twenty-six year old woman shrunk down to the body of a teeny child, getting her ridiculous mountain of hair washed by a teenager who kept cooing over how soft her hair was. Not that she really knew what the girl was _saying_ but she had hope that Orihime was keeping herself to at least some sort of bathing acceptable topic and not plotting to chop her into pieces. There was no coming back from this.

At least Orihime let her bathe by herself. She was allowed to soap herself up and scrub down without much in the way of supervision, but when it came down to the actual act of hopping in the tub, Orihime had set a timer out for her. Charades were ridiculously useful, and Ranka at least now understood the basics of how to count time in Japanese, so there was that.

Fifteen minutes. She was supposed to soak in the tub for fifteen minutes at the most, and if she stayed in there too long, Ranka had this weird feeling that the egg timer balanced on the windowsill would summon Orihime faster than the Flash.

She stayed in for ten and felt like she had boiled off a layer of her skin.

Orihime kindly said nothing about her godawful pajamas that were nothing more than leopard print sleeping pants and a really big black t-shirt she had gotten out of a Jägermeister box. Ranka chalked it up to communication issues and the fact that the word ‘Jägermeister’ wasn’t exactly going to be included on a high school student’s English vocabulary list. She was drowning in the shirt now, but it was still just as comfortable as it was when she first got it.

It was a weird kind of pleasant letting someone else brush and blow dry her hair. She didn’t even remember tilting her head to allow Orihime better access to plait her locks into a wrist thick braid. It takes hours, and she can tell that Orihime had much more fun with it that she did. The woman currently known as Ranka dozed off sometime between the first six inches and the last foot.

At least the sheer weight of her hair killed all of her ringlet curls.

Not that having a braid that went to her thighs was any better, but at least her hair was _managed._ Ranka laughed bitterly to herself, because this girl she had just met five hours before was actually better at dealing with Ranka’s hair than Ranka herself, the one who had had the mess on her head for her entire life. She didn’t even have bangs, oh no. All her hair was pulled back from her billboard forehead and she looked like a boy.

Ranka checked, secretly, when she woke up around four in the morning and proceeded to change clothes to flee the coop.

At least she made Orihime breakfast first. Growing children needed better nutrients than whatever in the actual nine Hells the girl was intending on doing with mustard and rice. She even cleaned up after herself, because otherwise it was just rude.

 

\----------

 

Everything she owned existed in two separate bags that were not all that comfortable to carry around and the clothes on her back. She had no currency that applied, half a bag of trail mix, two bottles of water, a smartphone and charger, one pair of earbud headphones, a week’s worth of clothes, two travel bottles of soap and shampoo/conditioner blend, half a tiny bottle of allergy medicine, a bottle of aspirin, a stick of deodorant, a safety razor, a toothbrush and toothpaste, three gel ballpoint pens, one sketchbook, a pack of mint gum, a folding pocket knife, a few things of chapstick, three disposable lighters, half a pack of cigarettes, and a bunch of miscellaneous things she had honestly thought she would need for a week long vacation.

Surprise. She didn’t need the vast majority of it.

Her identification and credit cards were basically useless unless she could prove without a shadow of a doubt that she was herself. And if she was herself, that meant that somewhere out there in the world existed another version of herself.

That was an existential paradox no one needed to have at the age of whatever she was.

So she was clearly going to need a new identity complete with Social Security number, birth certificate, and probably some form of visa if she really was existing in a reality that was not her own.

She needed somewhere to live and some sort of income to provide for basic life necessities. It rankled, but she was also going to need to figure out how to speak Japanese to a reasonable level. And that meant she was going to need to go to school, because she was pretty sure that at whatever age she was, school was still mandatory.

Her Google Maps app, while she had hoped would be the most ridiculously useful application on her phone right next to Google Translate, didn’t actually have the map of the town.

It didn’t help that there were essentially zero WiFi networks to connect to.

So she had to get her directions the old fashioned way: pen, paper, and charming little old people.

Urahara Shop was actually a place. Apparently it sold candy and other sundries, and that was enough to go on. It was ridiculously easy to screenshot the translation page of the handy map the nice little old lady walking her dog had written her, and she was off.

Modern technology was a goddamn miracle.

If she had some actual WiFi this would be so much easier. Or a phone network she could actually connect to. It turned out that her frugal penny pinching on network plans had come back to bite her in the ass, because she had exactly zero roaming data to work from.

It was apparently early enough in the day that no one questioned a little girl wandering the streets. Ranka moved like she had a purpose, acted like she entirely belonged and woe betide the poor soul who cut her off on her errand. She kept dipping her hand into her pocket to pull out the torn out page and consult it just to make sure she was going the right way.

The trick was to keep the police from asking her questions. If she could avoid them for her entire trip, then she was good as gold.

Japan was apparently much more laidback about kids wandering around on school days than the United States was, or at least Karakura Town was. She couldn’t tell, not that she really cared for the why so much as she did the success.

She had one and a half bottles of water left by the time she had walked clear across Karakura. She had started her walk sometime around six in the morning, and her phone was ever so helpfully informing her that it was now ‘service area unavailable’ o’clock.

The Urahara Shop, or at least what she was guessing was the Urahara Shop since her translation was dependent on her battery and she didn’t feel like wasting any of it when the name on the directions matched the name on the big sign above the traditional Japanese sliding doors, looked like a disaster. With a shabby apartment on one side and a more modern building on the other, the tiny little traditional shop looked like the exact antithesis of her problem.

Well, if she was wrong, now was the universe’s chance to prove it.

Ranka marched straight in without pause for second-guessing herself, and almost turned right around in sheer terror.

There, at the register, was a mountain of a man. Honestly, she wouldn’t have been so very intimidated if she had just been her optimum height of five feet and two measly inches, but now she was much smaller and much more easily tossed in a room to never see the light of day.

The mountain of a man spoke, and it sounded like a mountain. She had exactly zero idea what he said, but she was going to go out on a limb and assume it was something like “Welcome to Urahara Shop, why the fuck are you here and not at school,” or something else along those lines.

Ranka cleared her throat and raised her hand. “Question,” she said in perfectly clear Japanese. “Do you speak English,” she asked in English.

“Ah! Of course. Welcome to the Urahara Shop. How can I help you?” His accent was nearly invisible, but the giant with cornrows and a handlebar mustache at least sounded like he was a decent person. Then again, he did sell candy for a living (supposedly).

Ranka nodded. “Right. I’m looking for… oh God this is stupid. Is Urahara Kisuke in? Because if he is, I have the _greatest_ logical problem for him to solve.” Her fingers gripped at the strap of her messenger bag, light tan skin going bone white from the pressure. Ranka had no idea how to proceed if she was _wrong_ and had just suffered a mental break over night.

The mountain rose to his feet and she reflexively took a step back. “Of course.”

Holy. Shit. Sweet Mary, Mother of God. Either hers was a delusion that was being catered to, or this was actually happening. Privately she hoped it was just a delusion, because a delusion could be solved by buying a plane ticket and going home, whereas if this was actually happening she was in so far over her head there was no salvation.

She had spent so long freaking out internally that the snap of a fan under her nose made her lose her balance and fall backwards. The sound that left her mouth when she met eyes with the man with the bucket hat, was not a scream, thank you very much. She had enough dignity left to acknowledge that to herself. What she did make was a sound most charitably attributed to a panicked puppy, half yelp and half whimper.

“Speak English?”

The man nodded at her. “I’m told you had a problem for me?”

Ranka did not accept his help getting to her feet, because Ranka did not want to touch what could possibly be a delusion. Blonde hair, grey eyes, bucket hat and geta, tall as sin and in desperate need of a hairbrush. “What’s your opinion on transdimensional travel in relation to the concept of the multiverse?”

He blinked at her, took her bluntness in stride. “That would be impossible, little miss.”

Ranka smiled viciously. “Hello, Urahara Kisuke. I have come to make your absolute nerdy little day. All for the low, low price of one false identity that will stand up to any and all legal scrutiny.”

Urahara Kisuke, for he clearly identified with the name enough to look mildly shocked that some random little foreigner girl knew it, tapped his fan against his chin. “Are you suffering from some sort of mental illness, little miss?”

Ranka snorted. She was a kid; manners were irrelevant for kids. “Yeah ok, I can see where we would come to that conclusion. It’s a bullshit conclusion, but a common one. Hold up, I got this.” She fished around in her purse before triumphantly holding up her wallet. Tiny fingers were much more suited for slipping her driver’s license out than her bigger fingers had been for slipping it in, and she grinned as she brandished it. “Behold! An official form of identification validated by the state of Texas. Otherwise known as my driver’s license. Go to town, just don’t destroy it because I’m not entirely sure how to get that reissued as it is now.”

She scuffed her toe against the floor, fingers idly fidgeting with the slip of plastic and paper as she played keep-away with the scruffy shop owner. Her head tilted as she watched him think, and Ranka had the sudden feeling that she was baiting the shark.

“Hmmm… that’s a pretty tempting offer, little miss. But what’s stopping me from just taking it?” She had to admit it was a fair question. But somewhere in his nonchalant tone and lazy slouch, the woman decided he was more interested in her answer than in actually stealing from a little girl. She locked eyes with him, brown eyes bored into grey under his ridiculous bucket hat.

She had to look up and up, tilted her head so far back that she could feel the knot of the ribbon Orihime had tied around the base of her braid compressing into the back of her skull. Ranka would get a crick in her neck at this rate. She opened her mouth to answer his question, the snark inherent to her very being just waiting to bubble out. And suddenly she felt like the world had rocked back on its axis, skipped a rotation and everything was spinning off into the darkness of space.

Her words wouldn’t get past her tongue, thick like whale blubber in her mouth and dry as the Sahara when she tried to swallow it down. All she wanted was to string along his expectations with what little truth of this universe that she remembered. But she couldn’t make a sound, hands dropping the card to the floor in favor of clawing at her throat.

Something choked her, something invisible and deadly. She could smell incense and dirt, mothballs and dust. And all the while her heart pounded in her ears and the only sound she could make was less of a word and more of a gagging cough.

Her fingers wouldn’t catch on whatever was shoving all her words back in her gullet. But she had to say _something_ that would catch Urahara’s attention. Establish yourself as a big fish in the pond and gain an ally. Make them love you and reap the rewards later down the line.

That was how it worked. Smile just right, say the right words, and simsalabim, you were living the dream.

She fell to her knees and gurgled, everything going dim and blurrier than normal as Ranka tried so hard to force it.

“Little miss! You have to let it go!” There was a hand on her shoulder, one that smelled like cologne and something dark she couldn’t put her finger on at the moment, that shook her gently to get her attention. Another hand gripped at her wrists and forced them away from her throat, kept her from scratching her skin raw to get just a bit more air.

Urahara was right. She let the thought go, the ever pressing need to win the debate before it had even fully began, and the air came rushing back. Ranka gasped and gulped, and didn’t realize it was a mistake until she felt the world spin and the lurching bubble of a burp that wasn’t just a burp came rushing out of her throat.

Panic had always made her throw up when she was younger.

Ranka’s last clear thought before she gave up entirely was that she pretty sure she wasn’t going to survive to outgrow the habit.

Barfing on Urahara Kisuke’s geta, and thus all over his essentially bare feet, was not conducive to survival.

 

\----------

 

The third day had always been the worst. Ranka remembered enough of years of childhood misery to know that when she finally managed to drag herself back to consciousness, she would regret it. But a memory over a decade old did not prepare her for the sheer misery her own body was going to put her through.

Her eyes felt like they were glued together, her skin like every inch crawled and itched, and every breath she took through her mouth was like trying to breathe through wet tissue paper lungs. She needed her medicine and she needed it _yesterday_ before the infamous coughing of her childhood started up all over again. Sniffling rather pathetically, she sat up from the rather comfortable and warm surface she was on, fingers grabbing at the fuzzy blue blanket that fell off her with a bleary negligence.

On the one hand, she recognized that someone had been kind enough to put her in what appeared to be someone’s bed. But on the other more important hand, the one that was right next to her urgent need to use the little lady’s room, someone had also taken away her purse.

So she stumbled through the halls wrapped up in the blanket, sneezing and wheezing all the while. The first sign of life belonged rather suspiciously to a black cat that wove its way out of her shadow and meowed at her. Ranka sneezed and sniffled at it, rubbed her eyes and managed to eke out a single word in her awful Japanese. “Medicine,” she croaked.

The cat meowed and waved its tail before it padded a few feet away from her. It turned its head and meowed again, and Ranka didn’t even question the logic of following a strange black cat in a stranger’s house. All that mattered was getting to her bags and stopping this infernal suffering her body was putting her through.

She needed her Benadryl, because you couldn’t sneeze if you were in a coma.

The world narrowed down to slow lurching and the back end of a cat that meowed encouragement when she stopped to wheeze pathetically. It only tried once to wind itself around where her ankles should have been if they weren’t buried under the dragging ends of the blanket, driven off by frantically waving blanket sleeves.

Everything she owned was spread out in neat piles all over a table that wouldn’t have been out of place in an operating room. It was eerie how the cat made a beeline straight to the two white pill bottles that took up pride of place in the center of the table, right next to her wallet and right in front of the green blob Ranka assumed was Urahara.

She coughed wetly into the blanket sleeve and made a vague gesture towards the center of the table. “Medicine,” she croaked out for the second time in what was becoming her most useful word in Japanese. Out from the depths of her pilfered blanket came a tiny pale hand that made the universal gesture for ‘gimme,’ and she tried her best to glare from beneath the warm cowl she had formed out of the blanket. “Need. It. To. Breathe,” came her faltering English that wheezed around the shape of each syllable.

It was probably ridiculous that a cat had to be the one to bat the bottle towards her as the grown man in the room was either too appalled by how gross she was or were too busy attempting to break into her phone to bother. “Thank you,” Ranka coughed out what was soon to be her second favorite Japanese word. Trembling fingers shook out a single bright pink pill into the palm of her hand and shoved it unceremoniously into her mouth to be swallowed down dry. That accomplished, she flopped to the ground with the expedient motion of simply folding her legs under her. She wrapped the blanket around her head so that nothing but her eyes could be seen, tight enough that she hoped it would help to cut down on at least part of the problem.

The cat tried to step closer to her and she held up a hand to stop it. “Nope. Not today, Satan. Drugs kick in, then you can have pets.” Not that it really mattered. Once her medicine started working, she would be coasting along at minimal capacity as she forced herself to stay awake.

Urahara chuckled, his fingers dancing over the screen of her phone as he tried in vain to access its secrets. “That’s not the kind of cat you pet.”

Ranka glared as best as she could. “And you’re trying to break into something that has three layers of protection, with two pin numbers and fingerprint security. Also, water is wet.” It took her awhile to speak, each word labored out from lungs that hadn’t been forced to work this hard in a little over a decade, but she managed eventually. It helped that Urahara stopped poking at her phone to turn his attention to her struggles.

“Are you alright, little miss?”

“I’m allergic to pretty much everything. So, no.” While Ranka was glad that at least someone in this building spoke English, she still didn’t want to engage in any kind of conversation when her entire body was rejecting the world around her. She wasn’t normally this rude when she was trying to win someone over to her plans, but Ranka was breathing through a blanket in a pitiful attempt to filter out the particulates that were giving her so many issues. There was no dignity in staring up at him from the floor and coughing like her lungs were wet bellows.

The man dangled her phone between his fingers, the pink and monochrome case glinting enough to catch her attention. “Hmm… so let’s say I believe you, just for the sake of argument.” The cat meowed and dodged out of his way as he bent on his knees in front of what appeared to be a little girl. “What would you do then?”

Ranka’s hands darted out like a flash, frantically reached for her phone and smacked noisily shut on air.

“Ah ah ah, not just yet little miss,” he admonished. “First an answer. One that won’t make you pass out at my feet this time.” A slender brow raised, and Ranka wanted to punch the smugness off his face. Sadly, child hands and stubby little arms did not any matter of intimidating make, and Urahara quite easily put the palm of his hand on the top of her blanket covered head to hold her at bay. “Well. little miss?”

She clicked her tongue irritably. “Tsch. Fine. Stockholm syndrome?” She wasn’t wrong, sort of. He was the man who had essentially kidnapped her and held her fate in the palm of his questionable hands.

Urahara blinked at her as she re-buried her nose in the folds of the blanket. “Ah… does that help any?” Her fingers emerged from the blue folds to indicate a small amount before slipping back into the warm fabric. “Huh. I suppose if you look at it from a certain light… I may have kidnapped you. But you’re not actually a child, are you?”

Ranka pulled her head out of the blanket to laugh wetly before breaking down into a series of chest aching coughs. It took a long moment for her to stop, one in which the cat meowed at the man until he went off to fetch the girl a glass of water. She drank it in a series of controlled sips and forcefully regulated breathing, tiny little breaths that sounded ragged and gross. Urahara waited rather impatiently, his fingers tapping away at Ranka’s phone as he tried to guess even the first pin number.

By the time she finished her glass of water, she had forced herself to breathe as normally as she could and her sinuses had cleared up just enough that she could manage to not sound like the wheezing asthmatic she was. “Nope. Seriously, I outgrew this like… twelve years ago. I did not miss rescue inhaler life ok. Also, I’m going to need an actual doctor sometime soon before the gross part kicks in.”

Urahara grinned and shoved her phone under her nose. “Show me how it works.”

Ranka grinned right back and coughed into the blanket. “Two numbers, one is a word and one is a novel title. And then a fingerprint. Not hard. But it’s pretty much useless without a WiFi connection, of which there are none floating around.” She took the phone from his hands and frowned at how much bigger it was in her tiny little palms. Sure the phone had been large before, but she could still comfortable hold it in one hand and stretch her thumb out to reach the far side of the bottom half of the screen.

Now she had to cradle it in both hands and stretch out both thumbs to barely meet in the middle. But finger dexterity was something she had always had, and her thumbs danced across the screen before sliding down to hold the inset button on the bottom. It was habit to swipe the side of her thumb across the button to wipe away the imprint of her fingerprint before she tapped at the screen.

Google translate was amazing. Her fingers danced away and Urahara watched, and she grinned as she rotated her screen around to show the white letters on the blue screen. “Hello! My name is Nome Ranka!”

Urahara clapped. “Very clever!” And then she flipped it around and tapped once more, and the tinny digital voice read off her text for her. “How does it work?”

Ranka shrugged. “Science? It’s just… an app. Really there’s a long drawn out explanation. But really it’s just a complicated algorithm. And really good dictionaries.”

The snap of the fan made Ranka jump, juggling her phone desperately between her hands to keep from dropping it. “I’ve decided. I’ll trade you an identity for information. At least… if you have any of use, little miss from fifteen years in the future.”

“Swap you an identity, proper medical care, and a stipend, and I’ll make you a copy of the translation software. As long as you don’t try to profit off it.”

He laughed behind his fan. “I’ll make you something to automatically translate for you. For extra service.”

“I suppose I should tell you that it does six major languages, so I expect this to be an identity that could stand up to the actual legal system of the living and the dead.” She grinned at him, her snaggletooth smile making her look especially adorable in a pure calculated move designed to disarm the elderly.

“Done deal. Pleasure doing business with you, little miss Nome.”

And so they shook on it, and Ranka had the sneaking suspicion that she had just made a deal with the Devil himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, any questions, concerns, or comments can be directed to either the comment box below or to my tumblr over at lacelich.
> 
> A playlist is available [here.](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt8TKIwj5EM2-ciz7xP-nnJZkFv7VAi5V)


	2. error: code_13_system_failure

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The plot arrives.  
> And by plot, we mean one Kurosaki Ichigo has adopted one Nome Ranka.  
> Also, let's fix some linguistics, shall we?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Er... gird your loins? I'm posting this in 8k chunks as I finish them so. Enjoy?  
> (I say as I marathon sprint through Nanowrimo at a pace I will never achieve again.)

She looked stupid.

Oh, Ranka very much appreciated the obvious care that Urahara Kisuke had for his research. As she was now Test Subject Number One, she definitely appreciated that he had taken the time to fashion a rather comfortable respirator mask that did its job so well she only needed to take one Benadryl in the event that the mask came off, and he had somehow managed to whip up an antihistamine medication that worked even better than the medicine she was on before.

The mask looked stupid.

It had two ports, one on each side, that she could attach extra filters to if she ever came across a situation where she needed them, and one port had a spot she could fit a straw in so she could at least drink while she wore it. The mask came in colors, but the prototype she was testing at the moment was in a white so bright Ranka had the ungracious thought that Urahara had no idea how children functioned.

Not that she was a child.

Getting Urahara a copy of Google Translate had been ridiculously easy. Thus were the benefits of having remembered to bring her charger, and she had simply popped off the adapter and plugged the cord straight into a computer she had made absolutely certain was from the current century. Urahara had laughed at her insistence, but she had in turn mocked him for having a computer that still used Windows ME.

Apparently her ‘future jokes’ were not funny in the slightest.

She’d rather carefully copied the program and cache of the app and simply dropped it on his desktop with a smile and a wave of her little fingers. Ranka had fulfilled her part of the bargain: she’d given him the program. Whether or not he could use it was entirely his problem.

He’d handed over a folder filled with paperwork legitimizing one ‘Ranka Nome’ from the city of Alice, Texas. She had a passport and a visa that she had swiftly checked over with the aid of her phone’s camera. Apparently she was in Japan under a medical visa, with her care being deferred to a Dr. Ryuken Ishida, with consultations by one Dr. Isshin Kurosaki.

Ranka was unsurprised that Urahara had either pulled a favor from both of them to manage this, or at the least Urahara had simply filled it out without asking permission. Either option was likely, all things considered.

She was not a fan of the fact that she had some sort of disease that apparently made her unable to breathe in any kind of regular atmosphere, nor that she had to wear a medical bracelet informing everyone that her mask simply couldn’t come off. Her parents were apparently dead in a tragic boating accident, and she was now considered Urahara’s ward.

And for the low price of helping with the testing, Urahara was now engineering a complex system of what looked like Bluetooth compatible hearing aids and more wires than anyone should have access to, an app she had downloaded on her phone, a subvocal microphone, and a tiny speaker buried in the fabric of her mask. The goal was for Ranka to mutter something, the microphone to pick it up and send it to the app to be translated, and then the app to send a verbal translation to the speaker. Simultaneously and conversely, the system was supposed to allow the hearing aids to pick up what people said around her, send that to the app, and then the app would spit the verbal translation back to the hearing aids to be played back.

It was slow going.

Urahara had slapped the system itself together in the couple of days Ranka had needed to fill her system with antihistamines and relearn the awful limitations of her childlike body, and she kind of hated how easily he picked up the program’s coding enough to alter it.

She had been restricted to the same bed she had woken up in, with the cat as her only company. Every time she had tried to say the cat’s actual name, the pressure on her throat had kicked back in and she had swiftly changed her mind. So Ranka talked to the cat and the cat would sometimes talk back, not that she could understand a word that came out of Yoruichi’s tiny mouth as she had yet to find a lexicon of Catese.

Ranka had been poked and prodded enough over the course of a week that she had actively memorized the route from her bed to Urahara’s weird lab.

What she had learned from his poking was actually helpful.

First, that she had somehow managed to regress fifteen years and become eleven years old again. Second, that she was a grand total of one hundred and eighteen centimeters tall, which her calculator helpfully spat out as three feet and ten inches tall. Thirdly, that she weighed a whopping twenty point six kilograms, and that means she was about forty-five pounds of asthmatic terror. Fourthly, she learned that all of her annoying childhood problems had come back in full force, but that her vision had improved enough that she only needed a pair of reading glasses to compensate for her nearsightedness.

Her eyes were still brown, hair still cappuccino, skin still the color of a fawn. Only Ranka was darker than she had been before, years of constant refusal to go outside wiped away. All her lovely muscle definition was gone; replaced with the pudgy charm of her youthful days.

But her lungs barely worked, and that meant she hadn't made it to a real doctor for all of her medical issues.

There was something about the squiggle line that had printed out from the thing attached to all the diodes on her skin that made Urahara frown. He wouldn’t tell her what it meant, but he did mention that she wasn’t to worry about anything unless she started to notice strange symptoms of her condition that she hadn’t had the first time around.

It was oddly pleasant being taken seriously by Urahara Kisuke. Then again, he had been her favorite Bleach character until puberty had struck like a vicious monster and teenage hormones had dictated some strange choices and preferences. Ranka’s inner twelve year old, that was almost her outer twelve year old now that she thought about it, was having _kittens_ at being a collaborator with Urahara on a weird science project from hell. So what if she had to have her blood drawn six times a day and each time made Urahara frown harder? Who cared if he had slapped a weird patch to the back of her neck and told her to never take it off, or he wouldn’t responsible for what happened?

Ranka sure didn’t care.

She had no idea what Ururu or Jinta said at any point, and thus she left them alone to whatever it was they did when Urahara wasn’t looking.

After a little over a week in the tender care of the Urahara Shoten, Ranka wanted nothing more than to go outside. This was a strange feeling for her, but there were only so many times you could recite the same random phrases from a travel guide before it got boring. She’d taken to reading out the status messages on her phone to attempt to break up the monotony, but there were only so many settings on even a smartphone.

The only way to get better at the system Urahara had rigged would be to practice at it. And that meant she was going to have to actually talk to someone who didn’t mind little words, bad grammar, and a voice that sounded like an extremely polite robot woman.

She wanted to eat something that wasn’t liquified or shoved in a blender until it was. Ranka wanted to put her teeth into something and chew until her teeth fell out.

But the mask had to stay on in order to test it properly! So she had to stress test it, and so far it was performing far better than the respirator she had worn the last time she was this small.

Ranka still looked stupid. She may have been a proponent of the military adage that no plan was stupid if it worked, but Ranka was vain enough to acknowledge that the wires and mask made her look ridiculous. Common sense said that Urahara had probably made the mask filter out way more than she absolutely needed, but Ranka would be the last person to really complain about it.

There were sticky patches all over her throat, some of them wired into the mask itself and some of them with little metal pieces she could only see if she angled her head just right in the bathroom mirror. A few of the patches on the front were attached with needles to make it easier for Urahara to inject medicine should her condition ‘act’ up.

One day she was going to introduce the man to the concept of an inhaler and save herself a lot of suffering.

Mister Tessai, because she just couldn’t bear to be rude to the man responsible for the Double Chocolate Cherry Fudge Almond Milkshake (trademark pending if she had any say about it), had made her a sort of neck brace-esque collar that buckled on to hide all the metal bits and keep her from ripping off the patches out of irritation. It was much less bulky than it should have been, what with it being made out of sparkly spandex and thin leather buckles.

The cat liked to jump on top of the clothes Ranka borrowed from Ururu every day, usually followed on the heels of the other girl and meowed annoyingly until Ranka got out of bed and took her medicine. Tessai did her hair every morning, cheerful plaits and braids that he had apparently always wanted to try on Ururu but couldn’t. Sometimes, if Ranka sat very still and sucked her green sludge through her straw for way too long, Ururu would sneak back into what had become Ranka’s room and braid Ranka’s hair.

Ururu was not very good at braiding, but Ranka was even worse. Frankly, Ranka didn’t particularly care if Ururu wanted to try being someone’s big sister for awhile. She was just glad she didn’t have to deal with the massive tangle on her head alone. It didn’t help that every time she went for a pair of scissors, the cat lost its mind and Tessai started crying into a handkerchief that Ranka _did not_ want to know where it even came from.

Ranka didn’t know what day it was. But she could manage to accurately remember an entire line of hiragana without diving for her phone, so she had that going for her.

Apparently the prototype for what Urahara had deemed the ‘Translation Matrix’ or ‘Honyaku bokei’ was something he was considering putting forward as a device to assist shinigami in their patrols. For reasons that baffled Ranka’s mind, the capacity to speak the language of souls in foreign countries wasn’t something every shinigami possessed, as some of them failed those lessons in the Academy. It was fascinating stuff. What really confused Ranka was that he kept asking her every step of the way what her limitations were.

Apparently Ranka had a say in what happened. She was the primary test dummy after all.

So Ranka had quite cheerfully informed Urahara that the mask portion was completely unnecessary and, as a matter of absolute fact, looked horrifying and would not be conducive to any portion of the reaping process. But Ranka did actually appreciate the effort, and could Urahara perhaps make it in black for the final version? If he could make it match her phone case, with some bright pink highlights somewhere, that would make her _year._

It wasn’t like she was going to grow very fast. Or stay here long enough for her own growth to actually worry her.

The cat never liked it when she told it that she wasn’t really concerned with long term planning. It liked to scratch at her and give her judgemental cat faces as she rolled her eyes at it. Urahara was a genius, and Ranka wasn’t a complete idiot.

No one needed blood to come up with an identity.

No one needed to knock someone unconscious and do invasive examinations in order to fake paperwork.

As long as she ended up going back where she belonged, Ranka did not care.

Then one day, out of the proverbial blue, it happened.

There was a girl in the shop. Black hair, a terrible accent that made her hearing aids work double time to sift through, and small enough that Ranka didn’t feel like she would loom over her. There was just one problem with the girl’s presence in the shop:

Her name was Kuchiki Rukia, and she brought the plot with her.

 

\----------

 

Ranka managed to get all the way to a park on the opposite side of Karakura before she stopped to think. It wasn’t necessarily a _bad_ thing that the plot was happening. Honestly, it had been a just a matter of time. The fact that one Kuchiki Rukia was in Urahara’s shop just meant that the world was arranging itself according to a plan that at the moment, only Aizen Sousuke and Nome Ranka knew about. And wasn’t that a terrifying thought to consider. Ranka had _choices_ to consider.

She could be Aizen’s foil. Counter every plan he made and steal a fan from Urahara so she could chortle behind it just as weirdly as Urahara did. She could crush his every hope underneath her cute little gifted red leather Mary Jane’s, make friends with the Visored and be the shadow hand to move strategic pieces as she willed.

Except Ranka at age eleven and whatever percent had about the combat capacity of a limp noodle. Noodle McNoodleson had no place in a shonen manga. Even as an adult, she was the token vodka aunt who showed up to every function drunk, or if she wasn’t drunk she existed in a permanent state of sass and snark. Sure, she knew how to fight. But any grown woman worth her salt had the basics of ‘punch or kick this bastard in the balls and run like the hounds are after you’ down by the first time they went out in a miniskirt and someone got a little handsy. No amount of combat training was going to be enough to go toe to toe with a shinigami.

Did she even want to get involved in the plot?

No, Ranka Nome most certainly did not.

She was perfectly content to trade future technology that had zero bearing on the course of the wars to come, because the Quincy most certainly counted as a war as much as Aizen’s madness did, to Urahara in the name of her continued survival. Ranka sighed behind her mask and flopped dejectedly down on a bench.

It did not speak well of her maturity that at the first drop of a name, she fled for the proverbial hills. Obviously she would be going back to Urahara Shoten as all of her stuff was there. The question was how long she could feasibly stay out before someone bothered to come looking for her, or if they even would. She’d been trying to be a good guest. Her mess was minimal and she cleaned up after herself, and most of her day was spent either in her little room or in Urahara’s lab. She might as well have been a ghost, if it wasn’t for Ururu, Tessai, and the cat.

Oh fuck, the cat was going to be pissed at her. Yoruichi was not the sort of woman who let things like this go. Ranka folded in half to press her forehead against her knees, today’s style of braided pigtails dragging against the ground. She had a terrible feeling that Yoruichi was going to meow and stare judgmentally until Ranka’s self worth went into the toilet and she vomited out words too fast for her translator to keep up.

She lived in a room of the shop that literally supplied all the gadgets for the plot. There were actual points in the plot where the staff of Urahara Shoten showed up to save the actual day, and if she stayed there any longer then Ranka might actually be counted as a staff member. It was bad enough that she jokingly referred to Urahara as ‘boss’ and he called her his ‘little assistant’, because they were awful people who understood the concept of sass on fundamental levels of their being. Ranka might even be too deep now with no return.

“Hey, are you alright?” Her translator chirped in her ear, and she had just enough practice with it to register that there was a teenage boy talking to her. Ranka’s head slowly rose as she prayed to any god that would listen that Murphy’s Law not kick in while she was down. “Kid?”

Nope. The universe was not kind, the Soul King had forsaken her, and fuck everything. Orange hair, the actual color of an orange, tall, muscular, staring straight at her with a concerned frown on what would grow to be an even more attractive face. Ranka may have been twenty-six on the inside, but she had enough of an artist’s soul to recognize potential when she saw it.

She took too long to answer, because he came even closer to her bench and kneeled down to look here straight in the eye. “Can you hear me?”

There was nothing for it. She had made eye contact (not by choice, but main characters and Pokemon trainers did not care about things of that nature). The main character had noticed her. “Yes.” There was only a slight breath of sound that passed her lips, but it was enough that his proximity let him hear the weird double talk of both her actual voice and the speaker as it translated for her. “I’m fine, thank you.”

“Wow, that’s really cool. How’re you doing that?” Goddammit, get the hint Kurosaki Ichigo. She was fine. Let it go.

Ranka blinked at his enthusiasm and had to remind herself that for all of his status as the main character, this was still a teenage boy. “Sound relay. I talk, it talks in Japanese.” She shrugged and tapped at her smartphone. “This controls it. Small words are best.”

Ichigo tilted his head. “You know, you sound like a robot.”

Facial expressions were not really optimal when half your face was covered with a respirator, but Ranka had been that child who mastered control of their eyebrows at a young age. She raised a single brow and tilted her head in the opposite direction he had. This time, she spoke loud enough to drown out the tiny little speakers, her English dry as sandpaper while her inherent need for sass took over. “No. I wouldn’t have guessed. But no one actually speaks English, so you get to be denied to joy of my snark for today.”

He waved his hands frantically. “Woah, woah. It’s ok! It sounds really cool!”

She shrugged and went back to her careful subvocalization. The Translation Matrix really worked best when she whispered like a church mouse anyway.“It does not. It sounds ridiculous.”

Ichigo grinned. “It really does sound awesome. Hey, do you mind if I sit here?”

“Do what you want.” God bless this boy and his big brother urges. To be fair, if she was home and saw some random little kid having a breakdown on a bench while they were clearly dressed like they had just broken out of a hospital, she’d probably be trying to figure out which adult she could call to come get them before they did something regrettable. So it wasn’t like she didn’t understand that this conversation came from a good place.

Ichigo plopped down at the far end of the bench, and gave her far more space than she would have thought he would have. Her estimation of his character rose by several rapid notches. “So, since you’re fine. What are you doing all by yourself?”

“Waiting.” There was no lie in that statement and she would stand by it until the day she died.

“For what?”

She turned her head and stared at him with as much dead blankness as she could. “The inevitable heat death of the universe.”

Ichigo nodded at her. “Right. So, I’ve never seen you around before. I live at the clinic, pretty close by-”

She cut him off before he could start any sort of strange exposition. The mysterious strangulation didn’t kick in, so apparently she was perfectly fine with revealing common information. “Kurosaki Ichigo. You live at the Kurosaki Clinic. I know.”

“Ah… you’ve heard of me then?” He looked sort of sad in a stoic kind of ‘grin and bear it’ way, and that just made her sigh at him.

“No. I’m from the future.” Aha! There was a loophole! If she made it sound like she was just sassing off and it was such a random statement that no one with sense would believe it, the mysterious rules didn’t kick in. Huh, the more you knew.

Ichigo, for his part, was apparently a gullible idiot. He gasped and stared at her all the harder. “You are? That’s so cool!”

“Strange boy. Do you believe everything you hear?”

Ichigo took a long moment to properly think about it. “Well… I trust you. You don’t seem like a bad kid. What’s your name, anyway?”

Ranka sighed and spoke clearly and loudly enough that the tail end of her chosen name was the only thing the translator spat out that could be heard. “Nome Ranka.” She gave a bow, because she may not want to be involved in the plot, but that didn’t mean she had left all of her manners on the train.

“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Ranka-chan!”

“No. Ranka is acceptable.” She waited for the translator to finish before clearly enunciating her next words carefully in order to avoid mispronouncing one of her meager bits of Japanese vocabulary. “Please treat me well.” Ichigo’s eyes went wide and Ranka grinned before going back to the translator. “I can’t speak Japanese. I’m learning. It helps.”

Ichigo nodded like he understood. “That’s really impressive. So, it translates what you hear too?”

Ranka tapped at the hearing aids. “Yes. Small words are easiest.”

“Mask. Why?”

Ranka winced behind said mask, not that he could see. Next he would be grunting and pointing at things like her inability to speak his language made her a Neanderthal. “Not that small. Avoid complex phrases please.” She waved her hand in a so-so gesture. “I get sick. The air is bad.” She wiggled her eyebrows at him so he could see that she was smiling behind her mask. “Urahara made it for me.”

“Eh? You know Urahara?” Apparently the weird deal Ranka and Urahara had going was in fact just as weird from the outside as it was from the inside.

Ranka nodded and made a hum of affirmation. “Yes. I live there. Temporarily.”

This was not a concept Ichigo took too easily. “But… with hat and clogs?”

Ranka wiggled her fingers in a cheeky salute. “I’m his research assistant.” She tapped at her mask and then her hearing aids. “And, test subject.”

That made Ichigo frown, and Ranka rolled her eyes. He may be named “to protect one thing,” but Ranka did not need protecting. “That isn’t-”

Ranka cut him off again. “Ichigo. Listen.” She paused to make sure the teenager was paying attention and that the hand on his mouth was not going to get her tiny little ass beaten into the ground. “I made a choice to survive. I do not regret it.” His cool image was in danger when faced with a tired little sick kid, she understood that, really did. But she was a grown woman who was only stuck in the body of a child, and that did not make her a child.

Ichigo frowned and Ranka threw her hands up in desperation before climbing into his lap. She ignored his blush and tapped him on the nose. “What are you doing?”

“Pay attention. I have to do this quick. Can only do it once. Do you understand?” She flattened one hand on the buckles of her neck guard and one on the top of her mask. “Do not move. Just watch and learn.” Ranka had gotten rather quick about unbuckling the brace-like thing, and she slapped it rather firmly on his chest before she unstrapped the mask from the back after taking a deep breath. And then she put her motor mouth and Japanese skills to use as she pointed to each part stuck to her neck. “Medicine. Medicine. Medicine. Medicine. Medicine. All of it is medicine. Monitor.”

She wiggled her fingers cheekily as she smiled at him. “You’re pretty!” And back on went the mask as she started coughing from lack of oxygen. Ranka took a few deep breaths and pulled her phone out of the one pocket on her borrowed floral print sundress, fingers tapping away to reactivate the app and sync everything back together.

“That’s disgusting. Really, really disgusting. Why would you do that?” Ichigo gagged and tried to look anywhere but at Ranka’s neck. She didn’t want to ruin the fun by pointing out that most of them were temporary additions to her person until Urahara could establish a baseline and Ranka’s health leveled off to an acceptable point.

Ichigo’s face was a study in horror, and she snapped a picture to save for her own amusement. “I’m sick. Urahara is helping.” Ranka scooped the fabric and buckles back up, resettled it around her neck and strapped herself back in. It was weird having the intravenous ports exposed to the air where just anyone could see. Granted, it was weird that Urahara had to give her quite so many shots, but she seriously doubted that anyone born before 1900 was capable of comprehending that less was probably more.

Speaking of which, she checked her phone for the time and patted Ichigo on the head. It had hopefully been enough time for Rukia to have left the shop and she could go back for another _absolutely disgusting_ drug slurpee and a refreshing liquid dinner after her stomach settled. But hopefully she had creeped the kid out enough that he would _leave her alone_ and merrily count her out of the plot.

God she had such hopes.

“I need to go back now.” And Ranka climbed out of his lap and merrily kissed her sanity goodbye. “I don’t want to be late for my medicine.”

Ichigo wrinkled his nose at her, and it was so frustrated it was adorable. “I’ll walk you back.”

No. No. _No thank you._ Her horror must have shown on what was visible of her face, somehow. Or maybe Ichigo was just a little shit. Either way, Ranka almost visibly recoiled at the not even an offer. “I’ll be fine.”

Ichigo grinned at her. Little. Shit. “I couldn’t just let a sick kid walk home by herself.”

She narrowed her eyes at him and glared as best as she could, which was not much when every ounce of her being just incited the elderly to coo and pinch at her cheeks. “Ichigo.”

“Ranka.” He grinned all the wider. Little sadist. Well, she had made his day horrifying and disgusting with the grossest show and tell ever, so this was probably the best he was going to get for revenge. “I have business with your dad.”

Oh. Hell. No. “Urahara is not my father.” He patted her on the top of her head and ruffled what bangs she had managed to talk Tessai into cutting for her without Yoruichi losing her kitty mind. There was no way she was going to lose an argument to a damn fifteen year old, especially not one that was being this smug. “Tessai isn’t either.”

Ichigo slung her onto his shoulders, because apparently being three feet tall in the land of giants just made that sort of thing easier. She made a sound somewhere between a squawk and a grunt, clapped her hands on the top of his head and wove her fingers into his hair. If she was older, and Ichigo was closer to her actual age range, this would be a great day. A man throwing her over his shoulders and putting his head between her legs was normally great.

Except she was pretty sure that she qualified as _eleven_ and Ichigo was _basically twelve._

“Down. Down!” She had to say the word once to get the software to spit it out for her, and then she started belting it at the top of her malformed lungs. Ranka was privately glad she had been one of those not so secretly loud children, and her diaphragm was more than up to the task of increasing her volume to a respectable bark right in Ichigo’s ears.

“Stop it! I’m just going to take you home!”

“Oh no boyo, we’re not having this shit today. Noooot today!” Ranka drawled as Ichigo carried her past the park fence. The main character was touching her, and Ranka was not having any of it. There was always more than one way to skin a cat, and getting down was not nearly as complicated as Ichigo would have liked to believe. Frankly, there were only a few ways that a child as small as Ranka could get an adult to willingly put them down and resort to simple hand-holding and exasperation to keep them under control.

If she was older, the mere thought of what she was about to do would have made her cry.

Ranka let go and put some faith in Ichigo’s upper body strength. She had always hated when her nephews pulled this on her when she was trying to be cool and failing miserably at it, and now she would happily reap the benefits of far too much time babysitting.

Good luck carrying a child when they were upside down and not helping with the process at all, Kurosaki Ichigo. Maybe he should have taken the hint and just left her alone, but no, he had to be _helpful_ and all that.

Folding her arms over her chest while her sundress flopped around her face was probably a bit much. The blood rushed to her head and made her feel woozy, but at least Ranka had the dubious pleasure of knowing deep in her bones that she was not going to be the one to get yelled at for this. No, the plot had created countermeasures for this sort of comic gag, and something cliche would be done about this shortly.

That moment never came.

What ended up happening was Ichigo started bouncing his shoulders and doing awkward lunges that made Ranka’s head dip dangerously close to the concrete and asphalt. She had two choices: either participate in her embarrassment and admit that she had been schooled by a practiced older brother, or pass out by either smacking her head on the ground or by the blood rushing to her head.

Ranka scowled behind her mask as she rested her chin on Ichigo’s head. She did not enjoy her walk with the main character, nor did she appreciate seeing the jaunty curl of a certain black cat’s tail disappearing behind a wall. The muffled manly snickering her hearing aids picked up didn’t make her happy in the slightest. Nor, and especially this now she contemplated it, was the thought that she had essentially just shown her pink ducky print underwear to half of Karakura in an attempt to avoid the plot.

This plan had backfired in less than fifteen seconds and there was no escape.

Not when her hearing aids so helpfully kept spitting out translations of Ichigo’s frustrated muttering (because apparently she wasn’t supposed to comprehend complex sentences or thought patterns) about how ‘who leaves a terminal child alone with that hat and clogs wearing nutjob’ and ‘is she seriously wearing the weird cousin of that freaking cartoon rabbit Rukia still can’t draw on her underwear?’. Which, again if everyone in this equation were older, that was kind of flattering that he had noticed her underwear.

On the other hand, there came a time in every older person’s life where they ended up caring for children for so long that not even a screaming three year old running through the house wearing nothing but what their mother gave them incited anything more than a bland inquiry as to if the child in question was cold or not. Usually one didn’t reach that level of nonchalance without numerous hours spent seeing the worst that children could do from a front row seat.

Ranka dimly recalled the time a child had stuffed a denim jacket down a school toilet ‘just to see what would happen’ before proceeding to bawl because their actual parents were upset. At the time, Ranka had been confused as to why anyone would even think like that.

Now she knew. And oh, sweet baby raptor Jesus, she regretted that knowledge.

It was probably petty that she refused to get off his shoulders when they made it to the Urahara Shoten, but at this point she was taking her digs where she could get them.

Ichigo was not having any of her games. He ducked into the shop with a nonchalant wave of one hand and a strange shrug that had Ranka under his other arm in one smooth movement. She would applaud his child wrangling skills if they weren’t actively being used on her person, but even her small grump self had to acknowledge his skills. “Yo! Hat and clogs! How’s it hanging?”

Ranka’s luck was essentially nonexistent.

Kuchiki Rukia had not finished her business in the slightest. Instead she had settled in for a cup of tea while the supposed last finishing touches were placed on a new product. Ranka had a terrible feeling about this.

“Ah! Ranka-chan! I’m glad you’re back. Say hello to our most devoted customer, Miss Kuchiki Rukia.” The smile on his face promised some die hard retribution, and Ranka did not particularly want to figure out what he would do. But her terrible feeling was justified far too quickly for her liking.

So, like a well trained monkey, Ranka subvocalized like her life depended on it. Which in hindsight, it probably did. “Good afternoon, Miss Kuchiki. It is an honor to make your acquaintance.” Funny how Google Translate could manage high academia but not basic phrases in English like ‘this puta over here’ or ‘get hit with a clue-by-four’. No, she did not want to bow respectfully to the plot while the main character of said plot was still touching her. Never in her life had she been gladder that the software automatically translated everything into the formal and much more polite version of what she had actually said.

She hadn’t quite managed to finish her sentence before Ichigo slung her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. “Hey, Rukia. Have you met Ranka yet?”

No, that was it. She would not tolerate being manhandled like someone’s forgotten luggage, or being spoken about like she wasn’t there, or dragged out like a dog to have her particular trick shown off. Ranka had been up since the crack of dawn, walked all the way across Karakura by herself, avoided the plot only be to caught by the plot, and been dragged around town by some stupid boy who had _orange_ hair and the audacity to toss her around like she was chopped liver.

Honestly, she didn’t know why it happened.

But Ranka burst into gross tears that had Ichigo panicking and Tessai scooping her up to put her to bed. He sat with her while she bawled uncontrollably, brushed her hair and didn’t say a word as she slurped up her medicine and crawled into his lap.

There was something strange about this place, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

 

\----------

 

Ichigo was gone when she woke up, and the cat had taken Tessai’s place. The pressure on her throat wouldn’t let her acknowledge the cat’s real name, but she curled her knees to her chin and stared the cat down anyway. “I want to go home.”

Yoruichi purred and licked at her paws.

That was the limit of feelings from the Goddess of Flash, and Ranka slapped her cheeks as she slipped her legs out of the futon. She’d actually gotten used to sleeping on what could almost be considered the floor, as long as she thought of it like wrapping herself in a particularly plush feather coverlet.

This morning, if it could be considered morning, started different than any other morning in the Urahara Shoten. She didn’t have any clothes set out for her by either Tessai or Ururu, and the only souls in the house either belonged to pills in boxes or the cat-woman who refused to speak to her. Ranka quite merrily proceeded to dress herself, and would have been perfectly fine if she had actually remembered that she couldn’t do her own hair.

Ranka resorted to forlorn glances at the kitchen scissors while she slurped down her morning medicine in all of its green gooey glory, and took two nonchalant steps away from it when the cat hissed. Right. She had forgotten that she wasn’t allowed to cut her hair.

But she looked like a psych ward patient when she didn’t do at least _something_ with the curly mess, impossibly long as it was and with the strange bags under her eyes that wouldn’t go away no matter how much she slept. Every time she complained about it to Urahara, he just nodded and changed her medicine again.

Allergy medicine should not make someone this tired. Lethargic and possibly wanting a nap, but not this badly.

All Ranka wanted to was curl up with something warm and sleep. It had only gotten worse and worse, and she had a terrible feeling that something in the de-aging process had gone horribly wrong. Maybe she was supposed to just… sleep until fifteen years had passed. She wished she could research it better. There had to be some legend that the plot was pulling on.

Oh if she was supposed to be Sleeping Beauty for fifteen years, Ranka was going to start stabbing the universe in the spleen and not stop until the world was a better place. She was a strong, independent black woman who didn’t need a shining prince in silver armor on a white steed. No, thank you.

(Not that she’d say no to some attractive man dedicating himself to her every whim, but Nome Ranka had zero interest in being saved by _anybody,_ least of all some idiot from a fairy tale.)

Highest of ponytails it was then.

“Hey cat. I’m gonna go for a walk.” She didn’t bother turning on the translation software. For just one day, Ranka wanted to speak nothing but English and damn the world and its consequences. She’d been at this every single day since she had struck a deal with Urahara, and who knew how long it had been since that had started.

Her mouth felt dry and she yawned behind her mask. The fringe benefit of wearing what could almost be a gas mask made of some weird fabric all the time was that no one could see her yawn, so she didn’t have to bother being polite about it. She blinked sleepily at the cat. “I think I’ve been inside too long. Need sunlight, bit like a houseplant. Wanna come?”

Just in case Yoruichi didn’t actually speak English, because she had no conclusive evidence that the woman even could, Ranka held her arm out with the elbow bent like a gentleman. Just to be on the safe side, she patted at her shoulder and lazily jerked her head toward the door.

Yoruichi didn’t take her up on the offer until she made it to the entranceway and swapped her house slippers for her borrowed little red shoes. The cat sprang up on her shoulder and perched with an indignant meow, dug her claws into the meat of Ranka’s shoulder just once before she retracted them with a prim little sniff.

The cat’s opinion was duly noted and ignored. Ranka needed sunlight and fresh air before she went stir crazy.

She closed the door behind her with probably much more force than was necessary, but Ranka did not care. It was her long awaited vacation day, because all work and no play made Ranka a very grumpy girl. It wasn’t like she had internet connection to veg out and watch anime all day, so she was going to have to go straight to the source. Since she couldn’t keep up with the voices on the tv, no matter how much she tried to focus on them past the sound effects, that meant that Ranka was taking a trip to the library to see if they happened to have at least something where the magic of Google Translate would either take over or was actually in English to begin with.

At this point she would kill for something new to do before her brain turned into mush.

The cat was at least amused that Ranka’s ability to communicate with the elderly still held strong even when over half of her face was covered. It probably helped that Ranka was abusing her status as ‘small, sickly child’ to shamelessly con proper directions to the Karakura library out of every store clerk she could find.

One of them was a takoyaki vendor, and Ranka may have looked extra pathetic in the name of getting something for free. He did not disappoint, and Ranka gleefully detoured to the park in order to enjoy the fruits of her labors. The cat stared at her in disbelief as she quite calmly untied the mask from her face and proceeded to stuff the still warm octopus stuffed balls into her mouth. “Oh so good. Sooooo worth it,” she moaned with her mouth full. Ranka didn’t really remember how long it had been since she had eaten something that involved actual chewing and wasn’t just a tapioca ball that Tessai had tossed in because he felt bad for her.

“You know what this needs? Vodka. The good shit, imported straight from Russia and served with nothing but more vodka and a chaser of vodka.” She munched on her takoyaki and empathized her point with the end of a skewer, waved it around in Yoruichi’s general direction and tried not to laugh at how disgruntled the cat was becoming. “All right, all right, I get it.” Ranka stuffed the last ball in her mouth and licked her fingers clean before she belted the mask ensemble back on.

Huh. Yoruichi was staring at nothing and she was madder at it than she ever was at Ranka. Well, that was something.

“Kitty? Whatcha lookin’ at?”

Stupid question Ranka. What could an ex-shinigami hiding in the body of a cat possibly be staring at that Ranka couldn’t see? She was giving herself three guesses, and the first three were not counting.

“Kitty? You… should probably go get Urahara. I’ll be fine. They don’t attack things that are weak. Right? That’s… that’s how Hollows work, right?” Ranka stood up like nothing bothered her, English rolling off her tongue in the most cheerful use of her customer service voice that she had ever managed. It was like she tried to merge politeness, adorability, and a tooth-rotting amount of cheer into her voice and blended it all together with a metered cadence and enough pep to choke a draft horse.

“If I can’t see them, I may as well be invisible. Look not into the abyss, lest the abyss look back. I’ll be fine. Bye bye kitty kitty!” Ranka made a little shooing gesture as she brushed off the skirt of her borrowed sundress from yesterday. She’d slept in it, but it wasn’t like anyone would know.

It was still kind of weird that she only ever saw the cat every once in awhile and no one but Urahara seemed to know Yoruichi was even there, but it wasn’t like she had been there all that long.

Had she?

Either way, Ranka wasn’t really the one in danger here. She couldn’t remember exactly how capable Yoruichi was in the body of a cat, but her inner Disney Princess wouldn’t allow any of her animal friends (no matter how weird) to be hurt. That just wasn’t how she operated. Besides, her soul was weak. She couldn’t see Hollows. It wasn’t exactly rocket science to figure out that Ranka might as well be a bump on a log.

_The Devil was a liar._

Yoruichi hissed and arched her back, fur fluffing as she began hitting that particular decibel that made Ranka’s hearing aids shriek. Ranka clapped her hands to her ears and sobbed with her head between her knees, just in time to avoid something that clipped her hair.

Oh.

Ranka’s eyes went wide. She was _very much wrong_ about how Hollows worked.

It was at that moment that Ranka remembered that she had been entirely bereft of  any kind of physical coordination that wasn’t entirely dependent on twitching her thumbs. But she was still her father’s daughter, and any child of his worth their salt had figured out the logistics of the ‘duck and dash’.

So Ranka ran, scooped up Yoruichi in her arms and didn’t bother screaming for help. Screaming used air, and she needed what little air she had in order to propel her body away from an invisible dead person that had become a monster. It was infinitely more difficult to flee from something you couldn’t see, and halfway down the street from the park Ranka began to feel that cold ache in her chest that meant she had done something she shouldn’t have.

It started with a tingle and would spread and spread until her fingers were numb and she had to sit down to catch her breath.

But there was no _time_ to catch her breath, not when she had to focus on running away with a cat in her arms. Ranka didn’t even know why she had snatched up Yoruichi. Clearly the woman could handle this sort of thing on her own if Ranka just bothered to let her go off and do her Goddess of Flash thing. But Ranka’s mind had stopped working rationally for reasons that were entirely beyond her comprehension. All she knew was that she couldn’t just let something hurt her cat.

And Yoruichi was, for all intents and purposes, Ranka’s cat. She fed her, petted her, slept with her, told her about her day, and everything else you did was a pet. Yoruichi was essentially Ranka’s only actual friend.

But cats existed in two states of being: solid and not-solid.

Yoruichi slithered out of Ranka’s grip with a purring and a lick to her hand, and sprang off in the direction of the Urahara Shoten. Divide and conquer, Ranka could do this. Her tiny soul was not much interest to a Hollow, not when such a tasty target was right there and so much smaller.

The cat hissed and danced around something in a lopsided circle before jumping on a fence railing and heading off with her tail held high.

So Ranka did the ridiculous and made her wheezing way back to the park. She was relying far too heavily on the extra padding her mask provided to hide the sounds of her difficulties with the art of breathing, but needs must.

Ranka made it to the park before she heard a gasp and a voice cry out her name.

“Ranka! Run!”

Too much, too late. She turned her head and locked eyes with the shocked brown of the bane of her existence. Her tiny hand raised once in a failed attempt to reach for help. “Ouch.”

There was a hole in her abdomen that hadn’t been there before, her blood running cold and burning hot all at once. Huh. She had never figured that was what her intestines look like. It was such a pity that Urahara had made her mask white; it probably wouldn’t have been so nasty for Ichigo to look at while she gagged on copper and desperation.

Ranka didn’t know why she tried to hold herself together, her arms clamped to her middle even as the invisible thing tossed her like a rag doll.

The world went fuzzy around the edges, like monitor lights dying pixel by pixel until chunks of it were nothing but black emptiness. She coughed, and it was a kind of gross she hadn’t ever expected to experience in her life. Ranka could feel it under her forearms, her diaphragm pushing as everything burned.

But she could see it.

Rukia all but punched Ichigo in the forehead, and there was that sizzle of bright blue-white light that came with a rushing whisper of black cloth. She couldn’t help but wince and try to drag herself across the ground away from the white masked thing that slowly started coming into focus.

Her world narrowed to the beat of her heart and the high definition quality of the Hollow that had, in all seriousness, killed her.

And a moment stretched out for an eternity, before she shuddered to a stop between one breath and the next.

_So long, and thanks for all the fish._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was right there, right there in the summary and the tags. Ranka dies. If you are new to the LaceLich game, she means her tags and her summaries. They are not euphemisms.
> 
> I'm sorry, but not actually sorry.
> 
> You may feel free to speculate on exactly what Urahara has put in Ranka's drugs now.


	3. null_statement

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which death is merely a state of mind.  
> Further, Ranka needs to stop making major life decisions because she is not good at it.  
> Deals are struck and the game begins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At last, 25 thousand words in, and we've _finally hit the plot_. God bless that took forever.

The world burst into screaming agony for just one moment, and then it was blank.

She’s seen the press of her insides, held her intestines in the palms of her too small hands. But’s it’s done now, over and past. She did something good with her life, didn’t she?

Ranka knew a thousand things, a thousand more uncalculated and a thousand more forgotten. She knew the name of the color of the inside of a broken egg, the way to turn her head to make a man smile, how to charm a bird from a tree with nothing but the palm of her hand. All she did was know and know, always wanted more and more and never was satisfied with what she got out of it.

Socrates once said there was “only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance,” and Ranka lived to follow that ideal.

And oh, what she learned on the way to her grave could turn a soul white with shock.

There are no after credits when you die.

 

\----------

 

She woke with a gasp, hands at her sides and face covered in something she didn’t recognize.

It was all just a dream.

Just an awful dream. It was a nightmare, and none of it had been real. She must have just fallen asleep on that stupid train and gotten sick from that piece of cardboard soaked in grease that masqueraded as a hamburger.

Her hands moved to press against her naked stomach, bare for all the world to see through a hole that gaped-

It was just a bad dream.

Wasn’t it?

Somewhere between the realms of sleep and wakefulness she realized that something had gone horribly wrong. Her fingers were wet, sticky with something that pulled at her skin and glued her sodden clothes to her body. There was something choking her, tickled at the back of her throat and she rolled on her side to rip the thing off her face and vomit onto the ground.

Ugh. She felt like she had gone on a bender and regretted every moment of it. Why did she feel so gross?

Ranka sat up and yawned, felt the bones in her jaw pop as she stretched her mouth impossibly wide. It was like she had just experienced the best rest of her life, coupled with the annoying agony of drinking too much too fast. Her head throbbed with every beat of her heart, eyes blearily blinking around as she tried to collect herself through the burn of sunlight. She didn’t want to know how long she had been passed out on the ground in some strange place, but some basics had to be observed.

Brushing her wet hand on the bottom of her sundress as best as she could, Ranka dried the palm of her hand before she reached into her pocket for her phone.

Damn. Four in the afternoon. What kind of bender had she been on that she had slept that long? For that matter, how lax were the police that they had just left her to sleep in what appeared to be (and she opened one eye fully with a wince in order to check) a public park where children played. There was an actual swing that little kiddies could have seen her degenerate body from.

She wanted to ask what was going on, more to lament to the universe than anything else, but what left her mouth was not what she had _meant_ to say. The sounds did not match the shape of her lips, the curl of madness that echoed. She had no words for what she said, only a feeling of terror and a rough transcriptions that dared not to be repeated and could not be translated. “Ep n’gha, ya kadishtu.”

She died. Ranka understood that. She just didn’t want to think about it. The fact that she had died and come back to life like some eldritch abomination was not something she wanted to contemplate.

_That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die._

A hand crossed her field of vision, cast a shadow over the screen of her phone and gently grasped at her shoulder. She couldn’t help but look up, eyes squinting against the sun as she tried to identify the hand’s owner.

Her mask lay like a limp fish on the ground next to her, and a different set of hands gently tied it back on her face as she started to wheeze through her red tinged teeth.

“Hey kid,” chirped the cheerful robotic translation in her hearing aids. “You had me scared for a minute.” He rested his hand on her head, fingers ruffling through her hair as he scowled through what looked like rage. Ichigo held his zanpakuto, bigger than her and probably even heavier, over one shoulder as he crouched to stare at her. He looked as confused as Ranka felt with one hand grasping desperately at her phone and the other wavering between grabbing at Ichigo’s sleeve or rubbing the tears out of her eyes.

She opted for the sleeve and the crying at the same time.

“Ichigo,” Ranka wailed as she clung to his arm and buried her face in his chest. “Ichigo,” came her muffled cries as she dropped her phone in favor of clinging to him like a desperate koala. He patted at her head, rubbed at the base of her shoulders and stared helplessly at Rukia.

He kept rubbing at her head, settled himself down so he could hold her better with a tiny grunt. “I’m sorry, I didn’t get here fast enough.”

Rukia bent down next to him in order to peer at the strange child he held. “Ichigo. How-”

He shrugged and kept on trying to soothe Ranka even as he stared down at her. “I don’t know. One minute she was… and now she’s…”

“Ichigo. Ichigo. Ichigo,” Ranka chanted from her strangely warm position. The main character would keep her safe. Apparently staying _away_ from the plot meant that the plot _came for her_ in increasingly painful and final ways, and this was to be avoided at all costs. All she had to do was be at least marginally endearing or at least helpful.

Ranka had thus resolved to stick to Kurosaki Ichigo like a barnacle to the bottom of a boat. He could get rid of her when everything evil in the world was gone, and she would just happily take two steps to the left and then backwards when anything dangerous showed up. She had learned her lesson: Nome Ranka was woefully not adapted for the world of Bleach.

She had wanted to know, and now she regretted it.

Nome Ranka knew what it meant to die.

“Ranka-chan, would you mind letting go of Kurosaki-kun for a moment?” Rukia tried her best to get Ranka to let go, even resorting to waving the discarded orange and tan body of a terrible plush lion in front of her with a smile and a wiggle. As if Ranka would be that easily dissuaded from her new life as a limpet.

Ichigo sighed. “Give her a minute Rukia.” He patted at Ranka’s head some more, soothing the frantic tears and sobs as best as he could. “She just…” Ichigo didn’t have words for what he had just seen before he cut the Hollow down.

Over her head, Ichigo and Rukia exchanged concerned glances. There wasn’t any help for it, not when any attempt to get the girl to let go was met with even louder cries that wrenched at Ichigo’s heart. He had seen her fall, seen her blood puddle on the ground and knelt in it even now. So Ichigo scooped her up in his arms and carried her to a bench to at least try to cover the fact that an invisible human was holding a tiny child.

A shadow fell over the park as a woman strolled her way forward, beelined for the bench and waited a respectable distance from the trio. Clad in orange and black, the dark skinned woman flicked her purple ponytail over her shoulder and whistled. “Oh, you look like a mess,” she said in accented English.

Ranka’s head snapped up, her fingers loosening their death grip on Ichigo’s clothes. She sniffled as she turned her body just enough to look at the woman before shock kicked in. Ranka knew she had sent Yoruichi off to get help, but she hadn’t expected that the actual _Goddess of Flash_ would bother to come back alone in her real form. The low scream of joy she made wasn’t something she was going to bother denying, and she had never been gladder to be wearing a mask before in her life.

Ichigo’s arm tightened by just a hair as he glared distrustfully over Ranka’s head. “Who’s the old lady,” he whispered into Ranka’s ear. His legs tensed as he prepared to flee with the little girl in his arms, but Ranka had other ideas.

Too little, too late, Shihouin Yoruichi. While Ranka appreciated the thought of the save, the fact remained that the cat had ditched her for just one moment too long. “Mama,” she said loudly enough to catch the woman’s attention as well as that of the primary protagonists. “That’s my Mama.”

_Suck a fat one, Yoruichi._

Ichigo’s jaw dropped. “Eh? That’s your mom?” He glared all the harder, because there was no way this tiny little sick child could have come from that woman. And then he remembered that said tiny child had been left in the care of Hat-and-clogs and that for all the time he had spent in the shop he had never actually seen the woman before in his life. If looks could kill, Yoruichi would be dead several times over.

Ranka blanched slightly under the feeling of inexplicable pressure permeating the air. She gently tugged at Ichigo’s sleeves and pulled a leaf from Yoruichi’s book: let the trolling commence. “Mhm. My Mama is the bestest and the strongest. Ever. Fastest thing on two legs in the whole world.” Ranka ignored the way Rukia kept staring in disbelief between the little girl and the woman.

Rukia became even more distressed when Ranka let go completely of Ichigo in order to raise her arms in the universal gesture of children everywhere that she wanted to be picked up. There was no way.

Yoruichi laughed. “Ah, my darling little child. Ranka dear, it’s time to go home.” Oh fuck. This was backfiring spectacularly. Ranka had forgotten that this was the master of trolling, the woman who poked Kuchiki Byakuya in the face and got away with it on a constant basis. Well, time to see if she could find the limits.

The woman strolled nonchalantly over to the trio at the bench and bowed. “Thank you very much for looking after my wayward daughter. Was she much trouble?”

“Mama. Maaaaama. You would not believe the sheer myriad of oddity that I have experienced today.” A careful finger on the screen of her phone kept the translator from picking up anything that might incriminate her later as she resorted to rapidfire English. “Now get me away from this lummox before I start making really awkward sounds and attracting the police. Holy shit I am not equipped for this and this child is going to crush my ribcage after I just _regrew it_ less than two hours ago.”

Yoruichi frowned. “Oh? My daughter tells me you were a great help.”

_“That is not what I said. Oh my fucking God.”_

Ichigo rubbed at the back of his head. “Eh, it wasn’t anything special- Wait, you can see me?”

Rukia nodded at his side. “Ichigo did his best! But, if I may be so bold, may I inquire as to who you are?”

Ranka seethed as Yoruichi began cackling behind the palm of her hand. “Of course I can see you, spirit boy! Ours is a great family of kannagi, and it is such a great day for our lineage.” The switch to English was abrupt and delivered just as quickly as Ranka had spoken. “Ah, I thought you wanted me to be your ‘Mama’. This great Yoruichi will be happy to oblige.”

“I take it back. I liked you better when you were a cat.” Ranka scowled behind her mask and watched as Yoruichi bowed once again.

The woman was determined to make her life a misery, she just knew it. First she didn’t want to let her cut her damn hair, now she was proclaiming her to be the greatest spirit medium and spiritual expert since Abe no Seimei. Why didn’t Yoruichi just shove her into Ichigo’s posse while she was at it? She flipped her hand idly. “Ah, yes. She takes after me on that end. Her father, god rest his soul, was just a normal man. I did tell him that boating wasn’t a suitable hobby. But he never did like to listen.”

Rukia nodded along as Yoruichi spun her lies. “That’s very true! But Ranka is such a delightful child!”

Heinous lies.

Ranka wriggled in Ichigo’s grip so she could rest her back against his chest and soak up his warmth through her now ruined sundress and jacket. It may have gotten rather unseasonably warm, but it was still cold out for early January. Besides, she had a mystery to poke at.

Up until this morning, her phone had been informing her that she had no service network or WiFi connection to determine any sort of useful information with. Now, if she wiped the blood off on Ichigo’s knee, she could clearly see that she had a strange little symbol in the top bar of her screen. It didn’t look like the usual pie-slice that meant WiFi connection or the fat triangle that meant cell service, but right next to the battery percent and bar there was a tiny little symbol that bore further investigation.

In fact, there was no symbol for any kind of network in the bar, and that worried her.

So she pulled open her phone menus, hearing a grunt from behind her as Ichigo’s attention fell on the glowing screen in her hands. Ranka ignored the pretty fish lady that served as her wallpaper and went straight for the top of the screen, swiping down with one finger until she had the quick settings options. She tapped and left her finger on the tiny arrow underneath the little skull icon that had taken over pride of place of either of her network options, and waited.

‘Networks’ showed a list of nothing but one option, and it was in Cyrillic and required her to squint and think really hard to recall the way the alphabet worked:

Sivka-Burka.

What in the actual fuck was a ‘Sivka-Burka’ and why was it her network? She didn’t recall signing up for anything, but at this point she wasn’t complaining. There was a highlight to her day now, and it wasn’t figuring out via violent disemboweling that she couldn’t die.

Ichigo tightened his grip on her, and Ranka frowned. “Stop. This is important.” Because whatever sass and trolling Yoruichi was up to had nothing to do with her at this point. The cat was on the prowl and had found her latest victim. Engaging any of them at this point wouldn’t do anything but focus the woman’s attention on her.

So she did what any sensible person who wanted to avoid the drama did: she pulled up one of the mindless games on her phone, namely the one with the koi fish trying to become dragons, and proceeded to tune out the world.

Ranka placed her fate directly in Ichigo’s capable hands, because she was done trying for the day.

Ichigo slipped her from his lap and actually held her hand as he went back in his body. The hand that grabbed at her bloody one was so much warmer, and he let her crawl back up in his lap as he continued arguing with Yoruichi over, as far as Ranka wanted to pay attention, if Yoruichi was really qualified to take Ranka away from Ichigo.

A small part of her wanted to fall to the floor laughing. Pre-bankai and pre-shikai Kurosaki Ichigo versus Shihouin ‘Goddess of Flash’ Yoruichi was no contest at all. Even limited to a gigai for her and his actual body for Ichigo, the Goddess of Flash would win every time for all time.

But it was kind of nice to not have to care about anything, and somehow he managed to fit her under his sweater like it wasn’t a big deal so she was under his sweater _and_ wrapped in his jacket. He even carried her when he finally got up from the bench, her little legs dangling out from his sweater as he made an impromptu seat for her out of his forearms.

And then he handed her to Yoruichi.

Because being her mother trumped everything.

Damn, she had just gotten properly warm too. She clicked the button to turn her screen off, slipped it into the pocket of her coat because she couldn’t get to her dress while Yoruichi was holding her. And Ranka rejoined the conversation to hear the worst sentence of her _entire existence_ leave Yoruichi’s mouth.

“I’m sure Ranka appreciates having such a caring young man such as yourself looking after her. She always does get such adorable crushes.”

Ranka’s spine went straight and she would have knocked the top of her head into Yoruichi’s chin if Yoruichi wasn’t the fastest woman dead or alive. Oh, hell no. “I will get my revenge for this. Just watch me,” she whispered into the woman’s ear with as much vitriol as she could manage. And then she turned her head cutely to stare at Ichigo. “Ichi-nii. Thank you for saving me.”

Technically he _hadn’t_ saved her, and the dark furrowing of his brows was all the clue she needed that she had said something wrong. To be absolutely correct, Ichigo had failed, and Ranka survived despite that because she was currently a freak of nature. She fluttered her hands at him from her new perch on Yoruichi’s hip, beckoned him closer until he scowled his way back over. “Ichi-nii.”

Careful fingers pulled the mask down from her nose and she smiled at him, prayed that time and a lot of swallowing had gotten all the blood out of her saliva and teeth. It was cute how he blinked at her, and she very carefully leaned over and planted the tiniest little kiss on his nose. “Thank you,” came her faltering Japanese. “Thank you very much.” She leaned back and patted her cold fingers over his nose. Up came her mask and back on came the translator. “I will return the favor. Thank you for helping me.”

Yoruichi bounced Ranka on her hip, all smiles as Ichigo blushed. “Ara, see. She’s adorable.”

There were no words to describe how much Ranka wanted to punch the woman in the face and have it stuck. She understood on a fundamental level now just how Kuchiki Byakuya could feel when faced with a single word, and she was now fully on board with helping him get his revenge for the sake of both of their bruised prides.

Yoruichi grinned down at Ranka as she walked off. “I look forward to your next challenge, Ranka-chan.”

And as they walked away, Ranka cringed as her hearing aids picked up the distant conversation between Rukia and Ichigo.

“She seems cute, your new wife that is.”

“Shut up Rukia.”

 

\----------

 

Sitting on Urahara’s lab table was not a new occurrence for Ranka. Sitting on it while mostly naked and with a cat purring at her side, on the other hand, was.

Urahara scratched at the top of his head as he let the light from the green glow of the healing kido he had cast on Ranka’s abdomen fade. “I don’t understand it.” The cat at Ranka’s side swatted away at Urahara’s hand as he absentmindedly reached out to touch his fingers to Ranka’s naked stomach. The girl in question tilted her head and glared.

“Shouldn’t you though? Oh former Captain of the Twelfth Division. Isn’t this pretty much your favorite thing ever?” Ranka clicked her tongue in frustration as she drummed her heels against the table’s edge. “Ah, excuse me for thinking that a _death god_ would know how to _come back from the dead_ as it’s only your _job!_ Oh my god this manga is a pile of shit. Why the fuck is the Omnidisciplinary Scientist failing me. Ugh, I’m not drunk enough for this shit.” She buried her face in her hands as she folded over.

“Ah, there there Miss Nome. We’ll figure it out. But for now… you’re alive!” The cat smacked his hand harder when Urahara reached out to try and touch Ranka again. He winced and the cat’s ears flicked, but the usual suffering of Urahara at the claws of Yoruichi wasn’t enough to make Ranka smile.

Instead she scowled, flopped backwards so she took up the whole table and Urahara got an impressive view of her impromptu temper tantrum.

He smacked the bottoms of her feet with his fan and she yelped. “Hmm, maybe run it through one more time. You might have missed something important, Miss Nome.”

Ranka flipped him off even as she folded her feet under the opposite knees and nonchalantly assumed what yoga practitioners called the ‘fish pose’ and everyone else called a chiropractic nightmare. She really was enjoying having a child’s flexibility far too much to let it fade now. “One more time. I went to the park with the cat. Cat started hissing at something that wasn’t there. Ergo, Hollow. Ipso facto, I cannot deal with that. I sent the cat off to fetch you and ran for the hills. Ichigo showed up. Hollow stuck what I am hopefully assuming was its arm completely through my abdomen,” she droned monotonously. Her fingers sketched out the expanse of the hole that had been in her middle, some part of her brain still registering that a hit had landed even though her body hadn’t.

“I died. Then I woke up and now I can see dead people and my phone somehow has a network that only works when I’m holding it. Also, have we figured out what the actual fuck a ‘Sivka-Burka’ is? Because I really want to know.”

It was never reassuring to know that the hero of your childhood, the one you prized for their intelligence and ability to get things done efficiently and awesomely, did not know what to do when faced with their problems. She was relying on him, and Urahara was coming up with nothing.

Ranka sighed and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes in an attempt to stave off a rage headache. “Look, you know. It’s fine.” She rolled on her side and ignored the warning chuff from the cat. “So. Let’s make a deal, Urahara Kisuke.”

He snapped his fan open and stared down at the girl. “Now, your last deal went well enough. But you haven’t exactly earned money to pay me for anything. And there is still the matter of room and board to consider.”

She scowled and tried to think her way out of the puzzle. Urahara liked knowing things. That was an urge she understood. But what did she have to offer that an almost ageless spirit of death didn’t already know or couldn’t find out himself.

Ranka silently cursed whatever thing kept her from trading her truly useful commodity like it was a replacement currency. Someone like Urahara could go far on even the tiniest scraps of information. It was annoying and far more of a handicap than she really needed. Eleven year olds didn’t have much to offer. So thanks, rule system, for making her life far more complicated than it needed to be. After all, she could only actually say anything about the plot after the information had already been revealed-

She sat up with a triumphant flailing of her arms. “I got it! I’ll play!”

Urahara tilted his head. “Ara? Play what exactly, Miss Nome?”

Ranka flashed a victory sign with both hands. “I’ll play. Against you and Aizen. Third party, actively skewing things for the positive.” Far be it from her to say what was actually positive or not.

He snapped his fan shut. “Now that… is not something you should know, little Miss Nome. You should have said something like that earlier.” He grinned at her, that smile that said she had done something stupid and played right into his hand. “And how do you know something like that?”

Ranka rolled her eyes. “Told you already. Transdimensional traveller. I may not remember _everything_ , but I remember the important stuff. So, I’ll play you. It’ll be like a shitty game of Risk, except you have an ally who will keep you from committing to a land war in Asia. And then you get me home.”

Yoruichi meowed and jumped on her lap with a purr, and Ranka didn’t even think before she stroked at the fur. Urahara raised one eyebrow. “Oh? And what do you define as being important?”

“Oh. Shit. Unavoidable death? Like, save all the big fish in the pond. But… you have to help me save some of them. I can’t exactly do much,” she tried to explain as her proverbial steam ran out. Now she had put that on the table, Ranka started running up a mental tally of how very many instances of terrible story writing she was going to have to go up against.

Urahara hummed and handed her the dress of the day, one pretty sunflower pattern sundress chosen by Yoruichi simply because Ranka had wrinkled her nose at it. “Now, who exactly are you going to have to try to ‘save’, little Miss Nome?”

She shook her head as she pulled the dress over her shoulders. “Caaaaaan’t tell you that. Stupid rules won’t let me. If I try, I just get choked out like a _bitch_ and that’s useless as fuck. So, assume that I’m trying and if I ask for help, then help if you can. I’m… gonna punt the fucking plot right in its fucking face and eat its liver for breakfast. If you get me home anyway.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “And if I don’t?”

“Then I park my ass in Ichi-nii’s house and cry so hard at his dad about how I’m dying and no one will help me, and never fucking leave it until I wipe my phone and sell it to the highest fucking bidder, and cart my ass off somewhere you will _never find me_.” Alaska. Alaska was great this time of year. Or maybe she could go somewhere warm with barely any people and just, quit life and become a writer or something. And she knew perfectly well that a phone from fifteen years in the future would spark one hell of a bidding war. Or she could just be lazy and sell the thing to Samsung, since it had the logo on it already.

Either way, she’d be rich as sin in a heartbeat.

Urahara gave her a long stare that was equal parts unimpressed and amused. “Well, you are sick, Miss Nome.”

“Nowhere near as sick as you make it sound. Gimme some Singulair, Claritin, Albuterol, Flonase, Seravent, and some Flovent, and I will be right as rain. Yeah, suck it, I still remember everything I took until I was seventeen.” She wiggled her middle fingers at him, just as unimpressed with him as he was with her. “It’s allergies and allergy induced asthma, you daft man. All of this is completely unnecessary.”

“Oh? So all of my efforts have been for nothing? And here I thought you would appreciate only having one medicine to take every morning instead of six.”

Ranka glared at his smirk. “Sir, I don’t know how to tell you this, so I’m just going to be honest. This is not what we came here today to argue over. Deal’s on the table for the next forty-five minutes. Think it over and just remember… I know the plot. I just can’t _say anything_ about it.”

Urahara nodded. “I see. One question then, little Miss Nome. Since you do know the plot and can’t say anything one way or another… who is your favorite character?”

She waited for a moment, tested the constraints of the rules and grinned when the pressure failed. “Spoilers. Favorite from can’t say the name faction is Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez. Favorite shinigami is Zaraki Kenpachi. Favorite Quincy is… cannot say that ok. And favorite refugee is… can say that, oh good, Hirako Shinji.” Ranka tilted her head and rolled her eyes as she ran words through her head and waited for the choking. “The rules are trying to choke me out over any further specificity like the ‘why’ and the ‘when’ and the anything really. But apparently the logic of ‘because I’d fuck the brains out of them’ is still on the table, so that’s… gross and not even happening.”

Yoruichi made a strange chuffing purr and hopped into Ranka’s lap to be stroked like the cat she currently was. “So, you’ll play the game with me. But that means that you’re going to play _against_ me.”

Ranka sighed and crooked her fingers to scratch into the hollow on Yoruichi’s nape. “Mhmm. I’d be against every major player. All factions. But, I’ll be actively working for the greater good.” She snorted out a little laugh when she said ‘for the greater good’, following it up with a terrible pun in Japanese. “Let’s kouken.”

Let’s contribute, says the prisoner to their jailer. Let me free so I can act for the greater good, says the child to the ageless god.

It was ridiculous, but Ranka argued for something no sane being would ever argue for: the right to play God.

And Ranka won.

“So… what do you need from me to make this work, little Miss Nome?”

She smiled behind her mask. The game was afoot.

 

\----------

 

The organization known as the Gotei 13 was not, in fact, the only organization in the world that dealt with the deceased. It dealt primarily with those souls that either originated in Japan or dwelt within it proper, but did have limited jurisdictional oversight when working with other organizations like it to deal with souls that had left their primary jurisdiction.

In short, anyone who thought the Gotei 13 was the only organization of its kind was an idiot.

Nome Ranka had be inordinately pleased to be provided this information by Tessai over her evening smoothie, because it had rankled her that an organization as tiny as that would be responsible for the estimated six billion living souls at the time. Ranka had stared at Tessai and curtly informed him that by 2016, the estimated living population would reach somewhere around seven billion souls and would continue to grow at a rate of approximately one percent every year.

Tessai had buried his head in his hands and wept at her sheer nonchalance over that particular number. He had then proceeded to pull out a map of the world and clearly draw the jurisdictional borders of each organization that answered to the Soul King.

Ranka had wanted to know why it was that no other organization would bother to assist the Gotei 13 in the event of emergency, and Urahara had smiled behind his fan.

She wasn’t allowed to give spoilers, but questions on policy weren’t spoilers. Questions on policy were nothing more than exactly that: a question on how the world worked as one studied it.

Nome Ranka zeroed in on the North American organization with an almost lethal focus. She wanted to know its divisions, procedures, how one went about reaping souls within their jurisdiction, what the paperwork looked like, who was in charge, what the structure of the organization itself was. Ranka stared at the elder Urahara Shoten employees when they wanted to know the reasons behind her questions.

There would come a point in time where Nome Ranka would need to know enough about the North American organization to be able to pretend to be from it.

This made sense in her head, as she stuffed the straw back into the port. The core basis of a good con was knowing enough about the lie to be able to lie convincingly. She had time; the plot of Bleach that she was most concerned with literally lying her way through had taken two months to get through.

Or at least she thought she had time, before she checked the time the once on her phone.

Nome Ranka had gotten on a train on December 28, 2016 and the current date was May 13, 2001.

This did not bode well.

Thus she had begun a speed cramming session that spoke of a desperation neither Tessai or Urahara understood. She needed to know enough about the North Americans to be able to convincingly play at being a lesser ranked Soul Reaper from one of its less popular divisions. Which meant she needed the uniform and all accompanying bits, as well as the knowledge of how to wear it all properly. Or at least properly for the equivalent of an unseated member.

The North American division had apparently been far too influenced by European military conventions, of which Ranka was secretly glad for, and had structured its organization appropriately. Each division was given a number, much like the Gotei 13, and then a function. This function was then reflected in its coat of arms, worn proudly on a colored patch attached to a cloth that tied on their forearms. Additional rank insignia were added to this patch until you could tell who was from where and had what rank at a single glance.

Ranka understood this.

Unlike Tessai and Urahara, she also understood why the uniforms looked like they came almost straight out of a historical reenactment of French colonization of Canada as per the Compagnies Franches de la Marine which apparently no one aside from Google and Sivka-Burka knew what that even was. It took a long time for her to explain that ‘America was colonized by the French too, not just Christopher Columbus and the British’  and that ‘French people historically were very vain’.

And then she requested a uniform be attained for her.

Which, since she was so tiny, Urahara had stared her straight in the eyes and informed her that she was going to have to work extra hard at making Tessai like her so that he would make her one, because they simply couldn’t afford to requisition something like that on such short notice without attracting undue attention.

Further, she needed to narrow down exactly which branch of the United Federation of Souls Guard Brigades she could logically belong to and which branch of the Gotei 13 she could logically transfer to.

Ranka worked backwards. The worst division at paperwork in the Gotei 13 was, and would remain for the duration of its captain’s tenure, the Eleventh Division. Urahara had needed to sit down and try very hard not to laugh when she so proudly claimed she was going to be transferring to that particular division, but Ranka stayed firm in her resolve. The trick was to find a loophole.

The UFS Brigades, as they were called, were generally seen as upstarts by the rest of the afterlife’s proper divisions. With a short history compared to the likes of the Gotei 13 of Japan with its approzimately two thousand year reign and China’s organization that Ranka still couldn’t pronounce or spell without serious assistance, the UFS Brigades had subsumed the local traditions and split them up into a myriad of brigades that handled everything according to geographic or ideological preferences.

So Ranka needed a large division with an uncaring general who didn’t keep track of all of their members, and still needed to have enough of a combat reputation to allow for an easier transfer as a liaison.

Lance Corporal Ranka Nome of the UFS Brigades’ 4th Marine Division, also known as the Legionnaires, was officially on leave until her division was reactivated in the event of a Hollow Infraction. So in her downtime as she waiting for another war on her home turf was transferring to the Gotei 13’s Eleventh Division for remedial combat training in lieu of the loss of her scythe. Her current status as a combatant was further complicated by injuries sustained during a previous Hollow Infraction that left Lance Corporal Nome’s spiritual powers significantly weakened.

Urahara had gleefully forged that paperwork and left the dates blank enough to be filled in when they were needed. According to Urahara’s sage wisdom, there was no way that Ranka’s plan was going to work.

Ranka disagreed, because the Eleventh Division was full of idiots who just wanted to drink and fight things. She could work with that. Yes, fine, she would be the first person in line to point out that her practical knowledge of how to use a sword was ‘stick pointy end in opponent and try not to die’. But she knew how to use a knife, a skill she was more than happy to demonstrate with a chopstick and an accommodating Tessai.

The folding knife she had brought with her from home came in awful handy when faced with Tessai’s bulk later.

Tessai had essentially taken her under his rather large metaphorical wing in terms of her education and training. The goal was to work with her disabilities, of which Ranka wasn’t sure if being a tiny asthmatic really counted as being a disability, in order to train her up to the level of an unseated officer in terms of combat capacity.

She was not looking forward to the process in the slightest. But it was necessary, and at least Tessai would care enough about her inability to breathe properly in order to train her properly.

Training sucked.

No, that was an understatement. Training with Tessai on a strict time crunch was, in absolute fact, sheer agony.

There was no way any of them could acquire an asauchi for Ranka, a fact that Tessai had apologized for. But what he could do was train Ranka in the art of Hakuda. No one argued when Tessai had made the offer to train Ranka, out of what appeared to be nothing but the kindness of his heart. For her part, Ranka was terrified by the idea that this mountain of a man wanted to teach her how to get to a point that she could toss him over her shoulder.

On the one hand, Ranka had a quiet sadness that Yoruichi wasn’t the one handling her training. On the other vastly more important hand, she recognized that she was nowhere near a level of physical competency that the Goddess of Flash would deign to teach her anything. All she knew was how to punch someone and where to cut for an autopsy.

Tessai had assured her that knowing where all the major veins in a human body were was actually helpful when it came to fighting the dead.

At least she understood that headshots were the best route to fighting Hollows.

He had her running laps around the basement training room in order to train up her leg strength. According to Tessai, Ranka’s leg strength was her best feature in combat. Her noodle arms, as she laughably called them, would probably never match her legs when it came to pure pounds per square inch.

No one wanted to say anything about the fact that Ranka had zero spiritual power to speak of. Or rather, as Tessai put it, her soul existed on a wavelength that couldn’t be quantified by the Soul Society’s measurements of a soul.

It could still be knocked out of her body, and most likely still be devoured by a Hollow if she was unlucky enough. But her life’s chain was less of a chain and more of a giant magnet that would pull her soul back to her body within a gap of time that was too short to be measured. Her soul was a quantum equation in constant flux, and Ranka had stared at Urahara as she sketched a box with her hands and called it Schrodinger.

Ranka’s soul did not belong to the system that governed this world. Her soul had nothing in common with the cycle of death and rebirth governed by the Soul King of the world she had found herself in and thus it could not be contemplated by that system. That made sense to Ranka, as she wrung sweat from her hair and ignored the puddle of disgusting liquid that splashed into the ground. She had started relying on her mask and the strange medication she took each day in order to function.

Tessai woke her up every morning and gave her her marching orders for the day, and then supervised her hell training.

That was fine.

She was only eleven. There were limits to what she could and couldn’t do. At this point, Tessai’s gentle teachings would be the only thing keeping her from being picked apart in her lie by the Eleventh. A child’s soul had no place on a battleground like what the Legionnaires went through. She’d never be strong or fast enough to be a combat specialist, not until she had either grown up or figured out how to access her spirit’s energy.

If she even had any of the energy that Tessai kept saying that she did. The ability to see a spirit was not enough to _fight_ a spirit.

(No one at the Urahara Shoten wanted to tell Ranka that having a spirit capable of being knocked out of its body and shoved back in meant that she had _something_ to work with.)

Not that she could say anything like that where Tessai could hear her. And Tessai could _always_ hear her. Ranka couldn’t even think it to herself without Tessai smiling at her and ordering her to run another lap.

He drilled her on the protocol of the UFS Brigades, primarily how they were divided and under what circumstances the Legionnaires would be summoned. Basically, her fake allegiances were to a division that was only summoned when the mortals either underwent a war and Hollows were generated aplenty, any kind of mass Hollow invasion of the Living World (which actually made much more sense to Ranka than it should have), or in the event of a war with another organization. The Legionnaires had been proactive in most of the wars where the living of North America were involved in other countries or continents.

Surprisingly, the Legionnaires had extremely positive dealings with the Sixth and Eleventh Divisions of the Gotei 13 for their orderly and controlled violence.

It didn’t hurt that all the Legionnaires were crazy battle addicts who had all died violently and got their kicks putting down problems before they could make them have more work than necessary. Legionnaires were not known for their grace in konso-ing or in politics.

Ranka was fine with that.

She was even fine with the tiny little uniform that Tessai produced for her, made out of fabric he had pulled out of storage. Well, she was fine with it up until he smiled at her after she had changed and informed her that she needed to run her laps in it from then on.

Her general’s name was General Morris P. Widdershins. Her direct commander’s name was Captain Edward Teach (and yes, they had all stared at each other in shock while Ranka died laughing on the floor because he was _that Edward Teach_ and how he had managed this was beyond them).

Urahara had helpfully compiled a list of notable personalities whose names Ranka had memorized with an ill grace. She didn’t really need to know them, but it helped with establishing a cover identity. Plus, Urahara was a sick bastard who wanted to get revenge on Ranka for having the audacity to think she could be a third player.

Ranka did not want to be the one to inform him that there were technically _four_ players, but she didn’t care to start choking just to contemplate the sheer weirdness of Ywach and his ridiculous plots.

She couldn’t tell them when that cover identity would be needed, because Ranka didn’t even know for sure. All she knew was that it would be relatively soon and she needed to be prepared.

Noodle McNoodleson was not designed for this kind of constant strenuous activity.

Ranka started getting bags under her eyes and collapsing into her futon every night. It was a good thing her diet was primarily liquid and that Master Tessai (as she now called out of half respect and half terror) still thought that doing her hair every day was great fun. They had gotten to a point where he could braid her hair in thirty minutes flat, tie it off with a pretty bow up top and an elastic at the bottom. It would last her a whole day before they would need to do it again.

She looked ridiculous. Granted, she had been saying that about herself since the introduction of a mask to her mandatory wardrobe, but it still held true. The substitution of a uniform, no matter how snazzy and how much it made her want to start calling people capitalist pigs, instead of a sundress did not a better set of aesthetics make.

Two months and seven days, wasn’t that just a pretty bit of math?

Military boot camp could be done in anywhere from two to three months, and Tessai crammed everything possible into two months. She took drugs and choked down her dinner with a straw, cleaned dirt out of her mask ports and bit the blisters open on her palms until they drained. Sometimes she took her drugs and blacked out, woke up to the scribble of a pen and muttering of conclusions in regards to the batch’s effectiveness. Each time, Urahara asked her if she was sure she wanted to stay her course.

And each time she grinned.

Yes.

She was entirely sure.

Ranka was a woman who kept her word. And it wasn’t like all the medicine was completely bad. One of them killed all her pain, regenerated her injuries overnight, and all she had to do was remember to take it once an hour. Another drug made her reaction speed just a little bit higher, letting her body catch up with her brain.

It hurt and hurt and hurt, but Ranka didn’t stop even when she had to pull down her mask and cough up blood. She didn’t stop when Tessai punched her in the kidney so hard she puked all down her front, nor did she stop when she managed to snap her leg in half trying to kick Tessai in the head.

If Ranka tried hard enough and plotted, she could even withstand a fight with Jinta. Ururu was far too much for her to withstand on a constant basis, but she grew rather fond of the girl during her two months of torture.

According to Urahara, wanting to go into Soul Society at her current level was literally suicide. She may be functionally immortal, but that wouldn’t mean she would enjoy her stay in either the Maggot’s Nest or the Twelfth Division laboratories. And oh, how blandly Urahara went through the atrocities of the Twelfth Division. Bland as milk even as Ranka turned green and lost her lunch. Ranka was perfectly willing to test Urahara’s formulas for enhancing gigais and human spiritual wavelengths (both of which were apparently pet projects of his), and she would happily reap the benefits.

Sometimes Ururu and Ranka went at it a little too hard and Ranka ended up with her neck snapped or her jaw shattered into pieces. They didn’t have time for her to heal, or at least Ranka was convinced she didn’t. Urahara said she chipped away a little bit more of her humanity every time she died, so it was by mutual unspoken agreement that ‘suicide was not a cheap way to heal broken bones’.

And then one night Urahara and Tessai went out and came back with a boy dripping in blood, clad in black and a despair so thick Ranka could taste it.

 

\----------

 

They bandaged his wounds and left Tessai to look after him. Ranka would never tell anyone that she had volunteered her futon for ‘Ichi-nii’, nor would she acknowledge that she spent a disturbing amount of time watching him sleep, one tiny hand pressed against his throat to feel his pulse.

She owed him a favor.

Nome Ranka did not _owe people,_ because it was supposed to work the other way around. It irritated her on a fundamental level of her being that she had that deep of a debt to Kurosaki Ichigo. Ranka did not _do debt,_ she did deals and conquest. But for Ichigo… she would have to repay his unknowing favor. He saved her from a fate much worse than death, and so she was obliged to attempt to repay that.

She kept quiet as a ghost, curled up in her dark little corner and watched as Urahara laid out the plan.

Ten days to train him, seven days to open the gates, and thirteen days to save Rukia’s life.

Seemed fair.

She unfolded herself from the corner when Urahara left to go do whatever madness he did when Ranka wasn’t looking. “Ichigo,” she faltered through the single word and waited for him to quit trying to merge with the wall before she continued. “I owe you a favor.” Quiet bare feet padded against the tatami, and tiny fingers pressed gently against his nose.

“Ran-Ranka?!” Ichigo looked honestly surprised to see her, and her snazzy new uniform and mask didn’t help seem to help with his shock. He gripped her by her shoulders and held her, took her in from her white coat down to her naked little callused feet, and looked like he wanted nothing more than to strangle her for worrying him so much. “Where have you been?”

She tilted her head like she was confused by the question. “Here. Mama brought me here.” This… was not a lie _per se_ as long as you stretched the truth of Ranka’s relationship with her cat. Because at this point, Yoruichi was her cat that sometimes turned into a woman when it suited her.

Ichigo shook her gently, just enough to get his point across as he tried not to yell or aggravate his wounds. “Ranka, that was two months ago. Two. Months. Ago.”

Tiny hands reached out and gently patted his face. Normally she wouldn’t be so forward, but communication issues and Ichigo’s own panic necessitated drastic measures. “I know. Ranka had to get better so she could keep her promise.”

“What… what promise?”

“I promised to pay you back. For saving me. So I’m going to help save something important to you. Rukia is important.”

Ichigo let her go long enough to rub at his forehead like he was getting a migraine from listening to her. Ranka wouldn’t be surprised if he was, because no one had bothered to spend any more time to streamline the actual software portion of the Translation Matrix. Her mask was finished and swapped from the prototype to the much more life-friendly first production model, with less wires everywhere and even less patches necessary on her neck, but it still sounded like a monotonous robot. “You can’t just… decide that by yourself.”

Ranka sighed. “Why can’t I? You said no one else can do it, didn’t you? I can help.”

Ichigo shook his head. “I’m not going to let some little kid who can’t even breathe on her own drag herself into this mess-” That was as far as the translation managed to make it before she had to rub her ears at the high pitched whine as the program went too far.

She slapped a hand over his mouth. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Shakespeare. I know what I’m getting into. Do you?” Her head tilted as her other hand held up her phone. “Trust me. I’m magic.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jesus wept. For those curious, the plot we're starting with is literally from chapter 57. Ranka arrived in late December and spent a week and a half grand total awake before her death in around the middle of May. Hilariously, the date of the plot is considered to be July 20, 2001 for the purposes of timeline. Ranka has now ingested more questionable drugs than any human being should, and just did boot camp.
> 
> Noodle McNoodleson can now do a cartwheel without dying! Yay! Everybody clap for Ranka and her progress.


	4. framework_enabled

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we figure out what's up with this phone.  
> Furthermore, let's get this plot ball up and rolling. Training montage time!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't care anymore, I just want to get to the Soul Society. I've concluded that if I'm bored of something, I'm not going to write it. So if this seems patchy in spots, it's because I lumped it up to 'but no one cares'.  
> No. I am not carbon-copy writing canon. I will write it when it is different and from Ranka's perspective, which will be more and more frequent as time goes. Snowball logic, guys.

Ichigo did not want her to go. That was fine, and probably would have been more impressive if he wasn’t a teenager trying to tell an adult what they could and could not do. Not that Ranka looked like her age. But that didn’t matter in the scheme of things.

She had made up her mind.

Ranka leaned in and pressed a gentle cloth covered kiss to Ichigo’s forehead. “I’ll be careful.” He scowled at her and she giggled behind her palm, dodged his arms and bounced backward on one foot. “Don’t worry. I’m much smarter than I look.” Ichigo would spend the night in what had become her room, and she left him to recover as much as he could before he went home.

She closed the door behind her with a gentle tap, drowned out his frustrated roars as she rubbed at her eyes to keep from crying. Urahara leaned against the opposite wall, face serious as he held his bucket hat down to hide his eyes. “More things in heaven and earth?” Urahara did her the courtesy of speaking English, his low voice soothing as she tried so hard not to panic.

What was she thinking, trying to act like she was cool? Ranka was an _idiot_ who survived because of die hard tenacity and so much vodka in her system that the world barely registered on a _good day,_ and waking up eleven all over again in a world that wasn’t her own had drastically cut down on her survival mechanisms. “Eavesdropping? New low there, Boss. Ah fuck, I could use a smoke right about now.” She ran a hand through her bangs, gripped at the base and pulled lightly as she frowned. “He’s… going to be amazing you know.”

“If we can’t get him trained, this will all be pointless, little Miss Nome.”

“Hmm… I have faith.” Ranka wrinkled her eyes as she smiled up and up to Urahara’s face. “He is the main character, you know.”

Urahara sighed. “I’m leaving this in the hands of children. So, what’s your plan?”

“Hmm… If I told you that though… then you might change yours. And then everything will be pointless. I can say that I will appreciate your utmost cooperation in the days to come.” Ranka spun on her heel as she walked backwards, a skip in her step as she giggled quietly. “Do ya trust me, Kisuke Urahara?”

He pushed himself off the wall and gestured for her to make her way to his lab proper. “About as much as one could. So, you made him a promise then?”

Ranka shrugged. “Yes and no. I owe him a debt. My family… we don’t do debts. Debts mean you’re _lacking_ in something basic. We don’t tolerate _lacking._ You could say this is… squaring the debt. So I’ll skew things for him, and meet the terms of our arrangement as I see fit.”

“You say such uncute things for someone so young, little Miss Nome.” Urahara slid his lab door open and gestured for Ranka to go first. She pranced in and began the evening ritual of stripping down to her underwear and hopping up on his exam table.

She shivered as he drew another vial of blood from her neck. “You got enough of that yet? Because at some point these ports are going to need to come out before they like… I dunno, fuse with my body.” Ranka waved a hand at him when he moved toward her neck again. “Unless you still need them. But anyway… a promise. I told him I would return the favor.”

Urahara pulled his hat down to hide his face, and she politely left him to his fiction. “Little Miss Nome… Ichigo didn’t _save you,_ you just happened to-”

Her hands clapped on her ears, that annoying sound of madness curling through his words. Those weren’t the words he wanted to say, they couldn’t have been. Urahara was lying. Why was he saying things like that? Something was wrong with the feedback, because nothing made sense.

Gentle fingers slipped past her hands to grip at her hearing aids, and she lifted tear-filled eyes to stare at Urahara in unseeing incomprehension. He looked so grim as she blinked and blinked, choked on a sob and felt her lungs burning cold as ice. Urahara was kind as he slipped the little bits of plastic and metal from her ears. “Hmm… I thought I worked the kinks out already. My apologies.”

She’d worn the hearing aids for so long that Ranka had forgotten what it was like to be without them. It was strange and unsettling, made her head feel too light and her hearing go fuzzy. Ranka whined as Urahara palmed the devices.

He tossed them nonchalantly in his palm. “Can you hear me better now?”

Ranka rubbed behind her ears and opened her mouth a few times to attempt to alleviate the slick feeling in the back of her throat.  “Mhm. Feels weird though.”

Urahara nodded. “You should take them out more often. There are side effects to this sort of thing, you know.”

By which he meant that constant use of technology near spiritual energy or ran on spiritual energy could cause actual residual effects on her soul. Cheerful stuff, if not the stuff of potential nightmares, but she wasn’t going to be using them for so long that side effects would be a problem. Ranka wouldn’t have to worry about becoming dependent on the system to be able to hear the dead and the living alike, because this was only going to be a short trip.

Twenty days. In, out, Rukia saved. Aizen ‘dying’ and then turning traitor with his squad goals on point. Arrancar bullshit, Orihime abducted, people dying when they are killed, war between Aizen’s madness and Soul Society, blah blah, Ichigo loses his powers, timeskip occurs, humans do something stupid, Ichigo gets his powers back, drama drama, Quincy ridiculousness.

So ideally if she could get Urahara to hurry the hell up and get to work on how to get her home, she could get home _before_ the part where the time skip kicked in. Ranka had zero desire to remain eleven any longer than she absolutely needed to. In the meantime, she would be sticking to Ichigo like his second shadow.

All she had to do was save his proverbial bacon (or someone equivalent) once and she could quietly become about as important to the plot as say, that one shinigami who still did rounds in Karakura. The one with the afro who stopped by the Shoten every once in awhile and got unbelievably disturbed when Ranka handed him things. He was in a gigai; of course she saw him.

She could just fade into the background and quietly advise the actual inhabitants of the universe to do little things in order to avoid awful consequences.

Take no prisoners. Talk less, hit with hardest attack first. Throw out one’s manly pride and ask for help. Actually train Ichigo and don't just let him make shit up as he went along.

That counted as being involved, didn’t it?

Ranka had no idea how to actively avoid major deaths. But she had enough of an idea on how to avoid mass casualties via tiny fragments of whatever information that the rules would allow her to drop.

The captains of the Gotei 13 had been captains for longer than she had been alive. Even if she couldn’t convince the captains themselves to sway one way or another, she would still give them _doubt_ that their plan would work. Sometimes all you needed was a foothold, a tiny little seed of doubt that would grow and spread until everything came into question.

Because if this strange little child who had nothing to do with your struggles came out and said tiny little tidbits of your plan, obviously someone had leaked something and thus a new plan was needed.

That made sense, didn’t it?

“Ah… you’re a lot of work, little Miss Nome. Come on, no more crying. I’m really not… good at the crying.” Urahara patted her awkwardly on the head and stared at the ceiling, shoulders slumped as he manfully tried his best to quell her tears. “Your ‘Ichi-nii’ is going to kick my ass if you keep this up you know.”

Ranka gave a tiny giggle, mixed in with her sobs. The more Urahara griped about the retribution he was going to face at the hands of one Kurosaki Ichigo, the more Ranka giggled until her tears were gone. Eventually, once the burning in her lungs faded, she snorted ungracefully. “Ichi-nii couldn’t kick your ass if you tied both hands behind your back. But he’ll try.”

He grinned and ruffled her bangs. “He will at that. So, how has the last batch been? Any side effects? Mood swings? Itchiness? Sudden and painless death? Nausea or extreme drowsiness?”

Ranka shook her head, braid swinging merrily behind her. “Nope. Just the occasional moment of ‘can’t breathe for shit, help’, but that’s normal.” She paused and tapped her fingers against the surprisingly sturdy fabric of her mask. “Wish I could take this thing off and eat a steak though.”

Urahara snapped open his fan and chortled behind it. “Ah, but if you do, then all my hard work goes out the window.”

Ranka tangled her fingers in the edge of her camisole, fretted at it for a moment before she found the courage to ask. “So… what if I want to take it off?”

He tapped her chin with the edge of his fan, face serious as death. “Little Miss Nome, if you take that mask off, there is no filtration for anything. Your body will attempt to attack everything from allergens to spiritual energy, and your immune system will likely begin to attack you. That’s why we have you on your diet, streamlined your medicine, and I’ve made that mask you think looks so ridiculous.”

The furrow of her brow was all he needed to know that she was frowning at him, and he poked her right between her eyebrows with this fan. “No. Pay attention. The air of this world will. Kill. You.” He poked harder until she couldn’t help but wince. “We do not know the limits of your supposed immortality. We don’t know if it has limits, or even what the criteria are. With your luck, it only works on _external_ threats.”

Ranka gulped. She had not… considered that in the slightest. Urahara’s eyes narrowed. “No, you will not test your luck. You’ve made me a _promise,_ little Miss Nome. You promised to play this game with me. And in all the time I’ve hosted you in my home, I wasn’t aware I was harboring an honorless idiot.”

She let her mouth close with a click, held out a shaking hand for her evening medicine, and slurped it down in two long pulls. “I’m sorry.” Ranka couldn’t bear to look at his face, just grabbed up all her clothes and bundled them under her arm before she rushed out. So much for sleeping in the lab that night.

Ichigo wasn’t asleep when she made it back to what had become her room. Not that anyone could tell that it was hers. There were no assorted knick knacks that usually came with a child’s room, no traces of life save for the smell of cleaning products and the messenger bag she stuffed into the back corner of the room’s closet. Ranka had nothing extra in her room, asked for barely anything and kept her possessions packed and ready to go at a moment’s notice.

All her clothes that fit were on loan from Ururu and dutifully returned to Tessai at the end of every day. She had her masks and her fake uniform, but those were packed away in her bag when she wasn’t using them. Ranka lived out of what could graciously be considered luggage.

Ichigo had found her bag in the closet, probably when he went looking for an extra pillow or something to prop up his arm so it wouldn’t pull in his sleep. She skidded to a stop in her doorway, unsure of exactly how to proceed from there. Ichigo said something, slow and clear like he had actually been practicing so her phone could pick it up better, but she had left her hearing aids with Urahara to be fixed.

Ranka turned and closed the door behind her with a soft click, her feet padding softly across the floor. Ichigo tried to talk to her again and she reached up her free hand to her ear and tapped at it. “I can’t understand you,” she grumped in as clear of English as she could manage.

Ichigo tilted his head at her. “This is… Ranka’s room?” His English was accented, but still perfectly understandable. She dropped her clothes out of shock, the cloth uniform falling to the floor with a soft thump. “Here?”

She nodded. “Yes.” Ranka knew that word in Japanese at least. Tessai had made sure she had at least some basics of conversation down.

He spread his arms out and made a vague gesture to the blankness of the room. Charades it was then. She bent to gather her clothes with a sigh. Ranka then shrugged and crossed her way to the closet, folded her uniform coat and top neatly and turned to look up at Ichigo with a raised brow. “Mine. Yes.”

Ichigo ran a hand through his hair with what she was coming to the rapid conclusion was his default expression of a scowl. “Stay, here?”

“Yes,” she curtly snipped out as she shrugged and pulled out her much beloved and extremely soft sleeping t-shirt. Ranka held it out to him with averted eyes, because she really didn’t need to keep looking at the evidence of just how weak and vulnerable Ichigo was at the moment. Everything hinged on him, and she didn’t need a reminder on how just because she couldn’t die didn’t mean Ichigo couldn’t as well.

He looked down at the shirt and then back at her, and she scowled back with a blush. Either he wasn’t used to kindness or there was something wrong with her shirt. Seeing as how she had just gotten it back from Tessai that morning, and all the threadbare spots had been carefully reinforced, clearly he wasn’t used to kindness. Carefully, like the sounds would spin off into strange configurations if she didn’t do it right the first time, Ranka enunciated one of the few phrases Tessai had taught her. “Please, go ahead.”

“Ranka,” he started to say, and she couldn’t stand it. She shoved the shirt into his stomach and turned on her heels. It didn’t speak well of her to go stomping off, but she just couldn’t help it. “Ranka, stop.”

Screw him and his stupid stubborn pigheadedness. Ranka grit her teeth as she put the futon back in order, fluffed the one pillow she had and slammed it down at the head of the bed. She pointed at the futon and enunciated clearly at a volume that couldn’t be missed. “Ichi-nii, please, go ahead.” Then she pointed at the corner. “Ranka, stay.”

Ichigo said something that probably meant something unflattering, and he scooped her up in one arm to balance her on his hip. At least he had put her shirt on so she didn’t get a giant eyeful of bandages and teenager abs, but Ranka did not appreciate being carted around like a sack of potatoes.

And then he put her on her futon. Which was all well and good, but Ranka wasn’t the one who had recently gotten royally beaten by a pair of high ranked shinigami with swords, so Ranka wasn’t the one who needed to sleep somewhere comfortable in order to recuperate. Apparently Ichigo was prepared for this sort of thing, because he did some weird sort of flop maneuver where he pulled back the blanket, threw it on her head, and then squished her into a weird horizontal configuration with the sheer bulk of his weight.

Ranka was not amused.

Ranka was apparently going to be spending her evening as Kurosaki Ichigo’s body pillow.

_Great._

 

\----------

 

Ranka didn’t like it. Ichigo didn’t like it. She didn’t want to watch him suffer, and generally had nothing to do with his side of training. He didn’t want to watch her suffer, but had nothing to do with her side of training.

Her training was less about figuring out how to access shinigami powers that Urahara had very clearly stated in _English_ that Ranka didn’t possess and more in figuring out how to actually move her body without keeling over dead.

Ranka had mastered the art of tiny breaths and short bursts of speed at opportune moments. Tessai had been very firm with her from day one that long distance was never going to be her specialty. Ranka had rolled her eyes, because that was on par with telling her that water was wet. Where the object of Ichigo’s training was to hit hard and fast, Ranka’s was in how to not be hit _at all_ and _not die_ while she did it.

The last criteria made Ichigo really happy, to the point that he and Tessai had a sort of bonding moment with actual tears that had caused Ranka to take two steps back lest she be infected with their madness. It did not help that Urahara had nodded sagely behind his fan like he had some god-given wisdom of the ages to share with the rest of the people, or that Ururu and Jinta had started _nodding_ in solidarity.

She couldn’t even turn to Yoruichi for some sort of solidarity, because the cat was off whipping Orihime and Chad into shape, much like how Ranka relied on Tessai for her combat capacity.

It was a bit odd that one of the goals that the Shoten staff had agreed upon was ‘make Ranka able to scroll through her phone while running for her life’. Ranka would have been perfectly fine with just the ability to successfully flee for her life.

But no, she had to live with a bunch of overachievers who set goals for each other and expected the other party to match them, because that was just polite.

At least she got a break while Ichigo got kicked around by Ururu.

“Did it look this awful when I first started?”

“Oh… no. He at least can dodge. And not fall over every two minutes.”

“Thank you for your confidence, Boss.”

And everything went according to plan, right up until Tessai pulled an ax out of nowhere and sliced Ichigo’s chain in half. That was not according to the plan. Being sat on by Ururu and Jinta while Tessai sat in the bottom of a hole with Ichigo was definitely new.

“Ah, sorry little Miss Nome. But you can’t save him from this one. There is a way to survive after your chain of fate has been cut. It just isn’t something _you_ can do or help with, Miss Nome.” She growled and tried really hard not to get offended that Urahara thought so little of her foreknowledge. “He has three days. What will you do if he fails? Give up your plan? Do you have the strength to carry it through by yourself?”

It was hard to breathe with the weight of two children pressing down on her ribs and spine, harder still when Urahara had so many questions she couldn’t answer.

Thinking about it made her brain hurt. She tried to stay away from the plot, the plot shoved something through her abdomen and killed her. Ranka went with the plot, and now she was putting forward maximum effort. What did Urahara want from her? Because seriously, she was doing all of this with full knowledge of what lay ahead. Urahara didn’t even know how bad things were going to get, had no idea that there was a fifty-fifty chance by the end of the known plot that he would be _dead_ to some sleeper agent Quincy lurking in the shadows of Soul Society.

She made a pathetic little whine and grit her teeth. Ranka would be the first one in line to point out that she was _hopelessly_ outclassed by every single shinigami. They had been dead for longer than she had been alive, and used their time to learn some terrifying things. And what did she have? Forty-five pounds of asthmatic child with a smartphone did not a badass make.

Urahara tapped his cane against the ground before he moved and Ranka couldn’t help but make the tiniest scream. He stopped the end of his cane an inch from her eye with a slow smile that made the hairs on her arms rise. “See? There’s no Kurosaki to help you now. He’s right over there, and you can’t rely on him.” She couldn’t his face, not cross-eyed to watch the weird little skull-and-flames symbol on the base of Urahara’s cane circle ever closer. “Of all people, you know what’s at stake. And your brand of clever? That’s going to get you killed. I have no interest in helping you commit suicide. Give me something worthwhile, something that’s all yours. Show me that you can do _something_ useful.”

What did she have?

What could she do?

Ranka lay in the dirt for a long moment, even after Ururu and Jinta had gotten bored and wandered off to watch Ichigo in the hole. She flopped over, not unlike a fish, to stare at the painted ceiling.

What use did she have?

What edge did she actually bring to the proverbial table?

Nothing. She had _nothing_ that made her stand out as a shonen character. Ranka was the equivalent of the creepy little neighborhood kid who never went outside and only showed up in the plot to reinforce that the main characters had progressed beyond the human average.

What did Ranka have going for her?

She was a fully grown woman trapped in the body she had before puberty. Death by violent means didn't stick. The only thing of worth to her name was what weight a false identity someone else had provided held, and that wasn’t much. Her existence was one that had no meaning in the flow of the plot.

What use was there in an extra character?

Ranka sighed and pulled out her phone. Quick taps unlocked it, and she stared uncomprehendingly at the time on the clock. Her phone pulled times off the network. How the hell was there a network to connect to in the bottom of an impossible basement training room?

She tapped at the screen with a growing sense of trepidation. There it was again.

Network Sivka-Burka, status connected.

The same network she had connected to in the park after she had died. Not a cellular network, functioned via bounced signals from cell towers. This was a _wireless local area network_ that she was tapped into from _across Karakura_ and outside of any logical or possible means.

Trembling fingers pulled open the full Wi-Fi access menu, and she tapped on it to pull open its detailed information. Signal strength, very strong at 144Mbps. Security, WPA2 PSK. IP address, lower-case lambda. Go to webpage, [ http://sivka-burka ](http://sivka-burka). Everything was normal, right up until it got to the set IP address.

Google time. Except Google was not really Google, not in this world. The search engine of choice, for those who did have computers and internet access, was GuGoot. Google didn’t exist, and telling someone to go google something meant absolutely nothing.

Lower-case lamba, used in computing and mathematics to represent an anonymous function. There was a bunch of higher level explanations attached to it, but the quick way to explain it was that an anonymous function could be used to pass data contained in the function to a higher level function to be processed, and so on ad nauseum. That… did not explain why her IP address, that individual code that meant _her phone_ in particular on the network, was an anonymous function.

That made no sense. Maybe the network site had a help page she could get to in order to figure out exactly what all that even meant. But when she clicked on the link to access it, it wanted her username and password in order to have administrative privileges. That was… a bit extreme, but if she had a network that defied the basics of wireless networking, she’d probably want to lock it down too.

Time to play ‘guess the admin account information’ then.

First option, username as admin and password as password… incorrect. Oh thank god, the network administrator wasn’t a complete moron. She would have felt like she was taking candy from a baby if it had actually worked. Well, at some point she must have gotten the password to the network, otherwise she wouldn’t be able to connect to the thing in the first place.

Second option, she clicked on the ‘forgot username and password’ button. Sometimes it was just best to keep things simple. Ranka sped through typing in her phone number for mobile verification, and waited patiently for the cheerful ringtone to let her know that she had gotten a text.

Verification code received, copy and paste code into box, username displayed as… her real first name. Not Ranka. That was… creepy. Creepy in the same kind of unsettling way that having someone reading over your shoulder as you read porn on a train was. But fine, at least it was easy to remember. So she reset the password to something as ridiculously easy.

Pancake5!

The only password she could remember when drunk enough to contemplate the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Password reminder question set as ‘vodka’ in aggressive capital letters with six exclamation points and a smiley emoticon. It didn’t need to make sense to anyone but Ranka, after all.

There, access granted. She was in the network, for all the good it would do her.

And she blinked, put her phone on her chest, blinked some more, and then pulled her phone back up. All the page had was a list of settings, the same ones she had gone through on her phone the first time she had set it up.

App permissions, automatic downloads, automatic updates, sync time, system updates… it was everything useful about her phone and then some extra things that were greyed out. And way up at the top was the option to ‘allow all’. Well.

Shit.

What even was this? She had already set her phone to all the permissions she wanted manually, and the device itself would filter out everything she told it not to do. So of course she tapped the button to ‘allow all’.

Her hearing aids _screamed_ in that randomly pitched tinny sound that meant a dial-up connection was in progress. She dropped her phone to sit up with a shriek, hands fumbling in order to turn the volume way down so she didn’t have to experience the stuff of nightmares all over again. “Oh Jesus _fucking_ Christ on a cracker, the hell is that shit?”

Ranka’s panicked caterwauling was not appreciated by Urahara in the slightest, not if his grumping from the side of the pit was any evidence. “Language, little miss Nome! There are children present!” Unspoken was his gentle reminder that she too was a child, and thus should probably watch her mouth better. It was a good thing that Urahara only spoke to Ranka in English, because the dial-tone in her ears would have drowned out any useful translation into nothing but static.

She raised a hand in his general direction in a flippant wave. “Sorry! Messing around with the phone, did something weird. May have broken it, gonna focus for a bit,” she drawled as her fingers danced on the screen.

Accept app permissions for Google Translate, yes. Downloading updated settings from URAHARA.KISUKE, yes. Setting primary user profile to NOME.RANKA, fine. Synchronizing with Bluetooth capable devices, most definitely a yes if she wanted to keep using this system. Accept app permissions for a string of kanji by unauthorized user URAHARA.KISUKE, leap of faith yes. Synchronizing database, please not let this be a virus. Downloading updates, please don’t brick her phone.

She hadn’t actually paid the thing off before her train trip, so if she broke it Ranka would be up a creek without a paddle when she finally managed to get home again.

Ranka went through every single one of the several hundred applications, system apps included, and set the permissions for accessing the network manually. And then she cringed when she was all done, because her phone wanted to restart for a critical system update.

On the upside, her security patch for her phone’s operating system had been for December of 2016, so at least the basic common viruses she could have picked up in the year 2001 would be trounced quite quickly. Or at least she hoped that was how it worked. On the downside, now she was going to have to wait for her phone to finish updating and probably overheated while it tried to do so.

There really wasn’t an upside.

Hopefully, because Ranka still had some faith in the marvels of modern technology, her phone would sort itself out and she wouldn’t have to care anymore. If some weirdly philanthropic person wanted to give her town-wide WiFi access for free, she was not going to complain about it. She would take her wireless calling and texting with a gratitude and a smile.

The Urahara Shoten crew were having too much fun watching Ichigo in the Pit of Doom (trademark pending), but she could feel Urahara’s eyes land on her every once in awhile. Ranka was very aware of the fact that she had signed up to be his science project of the century, but there had to be some sort of limit to how far he would go. And then she remembered that she had literally just watched him orchestrate Ichigo’s metaphorical death in order to unlock his shinigami powers, and Ranka shivered.

On second thought, she’d stay over here by this nice rock and mess with her phone.

She had ten days to figure out what she brought to this. Ranka could afford to sort out her technical problems in order to actually have a functional communications system, because she burned far too much of her battery on running the app all day. It was such a pity that Urahara couldn’t figure out how to make an external battery pack for her phone.

Oh god, how much battery was this system update going to suck up? Had she even remembered to charge it before they had all climbed down into this pit? (For a given value of the word ‘climbed’ anyway. Ranka had made it to the bottom of the seemingly skyscraper long ladder by the sheer virtue of being carried down it by Tessai. It wasn’t cheating, merely a clever use of available resources.)

Ranka flopped backwards with a scowl on her face that no one could see. There was probably no way to validate her worth in a way that made sense to Urahara. Unlike Orihime and Chad, she didn’t have any particular powers save questionable immortality.

Her phone was hot, hot enough to make her juggle it between her hands with a wince. “Ouch ouch ouch, hot, very hot, fuuuuuck,” she groused. And there was the familiar glow of her phone carrier’s loading screen…

Except it wasn’t familiar at all.

Instead of the pink and white logo of her phone carrier, there was a greyish red horse head with a silver bridle and a neo-grotesque sans-serif font that looked like some bastard lovechild of Helvetica that proclaimed in all golden capitals ‘SIVKA-BURKA’.

Then the screen went black.

“FUCK! ARE YOU KIDDING ME YOU STUPID SON OF A MALADAPTED WHORE?” Ranka sat up with a strangled scream that had Jinta’s calculating attention. But Ranka didn’t care, so concerned with trying to bring her phone back to life that anyone’s input became irrelevant. She began what could possibly be considered the dance of her people, the frantic dash in ever widening circles as she held the device up and to impossible angles while she frantically pressed the center button. Her prayers were a litany of ‘no’ and ‘please work’, interspersed with frequent repetitions of ‘oh god damn it’ and ‘bring back the signal’.

Any and all attempts to catch her on Urahara’s part were met with an uncharacteristically skilled and limber spins and bends out of his reach. The only things that mattered were getting the lights back on and the network successfully loaded. Urahara wouldn’t help, couldn’t even begin to understand her frustrations. When his technology went to hell in a handbasket, he at least knew enough of the mechanics of them to replicate and replace when necessary.

Ranka didn’t have that.

The screen lit back up. There was the horse’s head.

She breathed a sigh of relief.

The screen went dark again.

And the dance began anew, until Urahara bowed out and just accepted it as something he couldn’t possibly hope to stop. “Little Miss Nome? What’s wrong with it?”

She stopped her desperate circles to skid to a stop not three feet from him, phone held above her head as she angled it down enough for her to see the screen. “It’s dead. I fucking killed it! I’m so screwed. This was not in the warranty!”

Urahara tilted his head as he stared at the woman turned into a little girl. “How… how exactly did you kill it? I might be able to help.”

Ranka’s laugh was a broken thing, a cackle that wouldn’t stop that made Jinta take a few more steps back. He wasn’t prepared for this sort of thing, and he had no qualms about hiding in Urahara’s shadow until the problem was gone. But Ranka was working herself up to tears again and no one knew how to handle that.

Urahara held out his hands, cane carefully balanced in the crook of his arm. “Now, now, little Miss Nome. We talked about this. Crying will just summon your Ichi-nii faster, and we don’t need that. Here, I’ll be your sounding board. Start from the beginning and let’s get through this.”

The screen turned back on and Ranka held her breath. White screen, horse head logo, screen going slightly darker, and then it switched to black with a grey little bubble that stated it was auto loading date and time. “Yes! Yes motherfucker! It lives!” She jumped for joy as her wallpaper pulled up.

All her apps were different.

But whatever, she could deal with that when the time came. The important part was that her phone was working again. She was no longer going to be forced to learn Japanese via the immersion method. “Oh thank fuck,” Ranka exhaled as she folded to hold her knees and breathe through her nose. “Crisis averted.”

The sound of clapping snatched her attention back to her audience of three and she blushed as she tried to pull herself together. “Well done! What… exactly did you do?”

Ranka laughed nervously and scratched at the bridge of her nose. “No clue. But it works now! So, that’s all that matters. Welcome to technology from the future! If it works, don’t ask how.” She then made a show out of waving Urahara back to watching Ichigo in the pit. “I got this, no worries. Tech is kinda my jam. Well, the software part of it. Go fret over Ichi-nii. I’ll just be over here, having an existential crisis and fucking with my phone at the same time. Is cool, I got this.”

She was pretty sure that the words Urahara muttered under his breath as he turned to walk away, sandals clapping against the ground, probably meant that he was calling her a pain in his ass. He wouldn’t be wrong.

Ranka found herself a comfortable spot on a rock right by a scraggly dead little shrub pretending to be a tree, and sprawled out. “Ok then… let’s figure you out, shall we?”

Her apps were sort of still there. All of her games were gone, and she sent up a tearful farewell to all of her accumulated units and levels, but her core functional apps remained. Every single one of her time wasting applications had disappeared into the aether, and it said something about her that she actually missed the widgets and useless little icons. No more snazzy ringtones, no more watching random cute little videos with kittens interspersed with pornographic art as she scrolled through her blog.

There was a new little icon on her main screen; a tiny little horse head with no label. She sent up a prayer to the universe for patience and salvation before she tapped on it.

Apparently, the mystery of Sivka-Burka was solved. Or at least the part of it where she wondered _what_ exactly it was had been answered.

Sivka-Burka was a network. That much she knew, but it was nice to have confirmation. It did not work off of satellite or radio towers, because that would be sensible. What it was, was apparently a network that ran off of spiritual energy. The questions that came with that revelation were shoved to the back of her mind as she stared at the manufacturer's information.

Sivka-Burka came from a Japanese source. That much made sense considering where she was. But there was no way for any kind of programmer to come up with something for an open source operating system that hadn’t even been conceived yet in this world. Therefore it made sense for only someone who had come into contact with the device to have realized it was coded differently from the usual operating systems. And the publisher was in kanji, which Ranka couldn’t read.

But that was what Google Translate was for.

Sivka-Burka was a product of something called the Crumbling Orb.

Seriously. Her shiny new impossible network came from that thing.

Ranka buried her face in her arms as she sat on the rock. When had she even come into contact with it in a situation where it would have reached out to answer her innermost want for something? And why couldn’t the damn Hogyoku have given her something actually useful?

It didn’t even do anything amazing or broken in accordance to shonen manga standards. Literally it just… connected things across impossible distances like a super amped version of standard WiFi. That was probably a side effect of the signal being sent through spiritual energy instead of the standard radio waves, so that just meant that her Hogyoku given power was to take her phone and connect it to the internet wherever she went. Her miracle network was a one trick pony.

Unless she got creative.

Sometimes she wondered if science worked the same way when applied to spiritual particles. What if there was a replacement for ethanol, one that worked the same way and could be combined with other substances. Could she find magnesium? Phosphorous? In the event of an emergency, could she make a poor man’s Molotov cocktail in a bottle of wine and set it off in a blaze of glory? Was there toothpaste that could be used as a base and a glue? Could she set a metal case aside and fill it with spiritual gasoline and liquid rubber, keep it for a rainy day?

If shinigami and their ilk were so focused on the concept of spiritual techniques, did they understand how modern war was done?

Napalm and kerosene, plastic explosives and iron nail shavings, could they be combined to make a bomb in a barrel and be set off for a wide area explosion? She knew they had some fire bird thing as a weapon, a flame so bright and hot that it could burn away a soul. But was it quantified as nuclear, kinetic, or something else entirely? What made the world of the dead tick and what components made it falter?

Could she use her so-called Google-fu to pull up a recipe for 2,4,6,-trinitrotoluene and have it still work?

Was it even possible to rig a set area to explode and take out an Arrancar? What about a Quincy? One of them was still human enough to die from basic things like removal of a heart or any other major organ. But then there was that zombie girl who consumed her puppets to heal herself, or even Neliel Tu Odershvank and her ridiculous healing saliva. So how did that work?

Ranka pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes and groaned. She may have had all the foreknowledge in the universe, but if she wasn’t even going to be allowed to make contact with Soul Society it would all be pointless.

Hers was a method of planning and wholesale war, no time to stop and think about the ramifications on her soul (if she even had one according to this world). Could she rig herself up with a jacket made of explosives and take out an Arrancar in a suicidal embrace or would they just survive it?

There were too many variables and not enough data to counter or balance them all. She needed more information than what paltry details had been included over the course of fifteen years of a manga and an anime. But she wouldn’t get any of that precious data if Urahara wouldn’t let her set foot near the gate.

At least she could safely discount the functional purpose of the musical series, because no sane reality included a musical number to set the tension.

That was if she even survived the initial encounter with the bulk of the canon characters.

But who was canon and who was filler? Would the filler arcs from the anime apply or would they just be extraneous bits tacked on like an afterthought in the nebulousness of reality? Could she count on the movies and the information held in them? She needed access to a database, and not one as restricted to Urahara’s access credentials. That meant she needed to go to the source, and not the one biased by the Gotei 13’s rhetoric and subtle militaristic brainwashing.

Ranka needed to get to Soul Society.

She had no business or concern with saving Rukia. The girl had only met her once, and wasn’t all that attached or altruistic enough to stick her immortal neck on the line for the rescue attempt. Sure, she owed Ichigo a debt. But that debt could be paid by stepping in just once, directing a needless battle just a little bit to the left. Make an ally out of an enemy and promise them the world while giving them nothing.

If she was going to play the game with the likes of Urahara and Aizen, she needed to step it up.

 

\----------

 

Urahara won’t tell her anything useful. Every time she tried to get his attention to answer any of her pile of questions, he would laugh annoyingly behind his fan. It vexed her on a base level of her being that he was being that profoundly unhelpful. But, as he liked to remind her, Urahara had already provided her with exactly what she asked for. So unless she had something else she would like to trade…

He wanted her phone. Ranka didn’t want to tell him that she had somehow managed to mutate it beyond the capacities of any technological device. They were thus at an impasse.

She had spent three days learning how to summon the network, three days scrolling through its functions and testing its capabilities.

Ranka had desired to protect knowledge. Her heart had made a wish to the Hogyoku because she wanted an impossible answer.

Urahara had a point, she just hated that he was right and she was wrong. She wouldn’t tell him exactly what Sivka-Burka did, but every time she got it to flash to that stupid horse screen he smiled behind his fan. Fine, she got it. She would have to figure it out herself.

The reason why she was really going to Soul Society.

Because she was scared.

Because she wanted to repay the favor.

_Because she was bored._

Because everything was fucked up beyond her understanding and it was pissing her off.

She was going to go to Soul Society and _go the hell home_ where none of this shit happened. And when she was home again, she was going to be content with her normality. Ranka would pet her fucking dog, get really drunk, and forget this shit ever happened.

On the third day, Ichigo came out of the hole in the ground and bashed his mask into pieces to dramatically reveal his face.

On the fourth day, Ranka came to a horrifying conclusion about herself and got herself the pony she always wanted.

On the fifth day, Ichigo graduated to getting the snot kicked out of him by Urahara on a consistent basis.

On the sixth day, Ranka graduated to the position of jockey.

By the tenth day, the gate was built.

 

\----------

 

“I can’t believe you strung me along just to get me to activate a super power,” Ranka frowned as she kicked her heels against a rock. Unlike Ichigo, Ranka had not bothered to go home for the week. Technically the Shoten was her home, so staying in the basement to practice navigating through Sivka-Burka via the clever use of the microphone built into her mask and the joys of voice recognition shortcuts was the more productive choice. Not that he hadn’t offered to take her with him.

She had turned him down with furrowed brows and a massive amount of confusion. Ichigo did not seriously need to watch her all the time. It was bad enough that they slept together, she didn’t need it any worse than it already was.

Her phone didn’t even need to be charged in a wall anymore, so at least she had that going for her. On the downside, charging her phone now required her to sit down and meditate once a day to clear her head of all the useless junk and focus on her real goals.

Ranka wanted to go home.

It was as simple as that.

So she kicked her black booted heels against a rock and made sure her little black tricorn hat sat square on her head. Ranka kind of liked the uniform of the North American answer to death gods. It was comfortable and had duck gaiters with shiny silver buttons on top of boots, so her vanity was much appeased. Unlike the shinigami, the reapers of the USF Brigades all had white coats, not just their captains. No, the white justaucorps had black sleeve trimming and coat lining, but the bulk of what they wore was nothing but white and silver accenting black. She even had a cravat on, and those had gone out of fashion hundreds of years ago.

Not that time mattered much to the dead.

Urahara chortled. “Why yes, yes I did, little Miss Nome. You figured it out then?”

Ranka shrugged nonchalantly. “Mm. Personal reasons. I’m going for personal reasons. And to blow shit up. Because this isn’t my reality, so might as well have fun while I’m here.”

He glanced down at her. “Don’t blow up my gate.”

“You can’t tell me what to do. You aren’t my real dad.” Ranka picked at her nails and turned her nose up at the very thought that she would undo all of Urahara’s hard work when she needed it just as badly as he did.

Urahara pulled his hat down low over his eyes. “You’re probably not going to make it out of this unscathed, and you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Mhmm. But, consenting adult. No worries; I’ll keep the kids in line. You got the thingies for ‘em?”

From the depths of his coat, Urahara pulled out a box the size of a baby shoebox and wiggled it in her general direction. “They have a name-”

“My network, my shitty naming skills. You want this field trip supervised or naw, sir? Because I can keep to myself and do my own thing.” Ranka rolled her eyes at him. “You’re the one who is of the opinion I have zero use in combat. At least Orihime has that one grumpy fairy. I just have Let It Go on loop, and that’s not actually a violent thing.”

Urahara waved over his shoulder as he went off to retrieve the ragtag bunch of kids she was going to be stuck with.

She played with the end of her braid while she waited, feet drumming against the rock as she untied and tied the little white ribbon Tessai had given her.

“Ah! The tiny alien girl!”

She couldn’t help it. “Ranka! My name is Ra. N. Ka!” Ranka leapt to her feet and pointed square at Orihime’s ridiculous face with a shriek.

“Right! So this is where you went, Ranka-chan!” Orihime clapped her hands and danced on the spot out of joy, and Ranka wasn’t fast enough to avoid the girl’s lunging hug. No matter how much her arms pushed at the girl, Ranka just couldn’t get her off.

“Let me down! I’m not a toy!” Orihime eventually let go, only after Urahara cleared his throat behind the two. Ranka proceeded to brush invisible dirt off her uniform and resettle it so it wouldn’t wrinkle. “Please don’t do that again.”

Yoruichi jumped up to the rock Ranka stood on and twined around her ankles until she reached down and placed her on her shoulders. The cat purred once. “Hello again, kannagi,” came the shockingly manly voice.

If Ranka could bare her teeth at the cat she would. Instead she had to settle for flapping her hands in such a way that the teenagers she hadn’t met would stop looking at her so weirdly. “It’s not what you think!”

The lanky beanpole that had to be Uryuu Ishida adjusted his glasses. “This is the help you mentioned, Mr. Yoruichi?”

“Oh my fucking god. Cat, what did you tell them?” She poked Yoruichi’s nose until the cat batted her hand away with claws out. “You did not seriously tell them that.” Kannagi, kannagi. Yoruichi kept calling her that and Ranka still had no idea what in the nine hells that even meant.

Yoruichi purred. “Well, you are our little ace in the hole, aren’t you, little miss distinguished oracle? Make sure to make your mother proud now.”

Little bitch of a cat. If Ranka believed she could catch the cat in order to strangle it, she would. Ichigo cleared his throat. “Is your mother going to be ok with this,” he asked in that deliberately halting manner designed to allow Ranka time for translation and comprehension. And then faster he turned to the rest of the teenagers. “Right, her mother said she came from some line of kannagi. Apparently she’s the best in her generation or something.”

Ranka rubbed the bridge of her nose, pinched it in order to stave off a headache. “Mama is a liar. I know one future. A singular possibility. That I can’t tell you about.” Chad nodded along like everything made sense to him, and she was getting this strange vibe that he wanted to pet her on the head like a dog who did its best. She sighed and executed a perfect bow, drilled into her by Tessai. “My name is Nome Ranka. I am in your care.”

Orihime clapped and Uryuu adjusted his glasses. Ranka took a precautionary jump down from the rock and left a wide berth away from the teens. “I’ll be coming along as… backup? I’ll be your operator.”

Urahara pulled his hat down. “What little Miss Nome is trying to say is that she will be maintaining your communications and intelligence. Which means you get presents!” He juggled the box in his hand and opened it with a dramatic flourish. “Everybody gets one, and try not to lose them.” Ranka waited for each of them to take one of the little earbuds she had begged Urahara to make for her. He had sketched out the plans for the earbuds and she had been responsible for their mass production.

She snagged a little clip version from her pocket and held it up to Yoruichi’s nose. “I got you one too, cat.”

Ranka almost expected someone to raise their hand to ask what the things even were and how they were supposed to use them, but Urahara had no time for patience. “Listen up, and this is important. Put them in your ears and press the button. Do not take them out. Think of them like an emergency lifeline. At any point, little Miss Nome has assured me she can use them to find your position to within five hundred meters and send you back-up if you need it. Try not to need it.”

Ranka raised her hand. “Press and hold the button to turn it on the once. Press again to mute or unmute. Everyone ready?” A series of slow nods were all she got in response. As Ichigo nodded, Urahara slipped behind him and jammed him neatly in the neck with his cane, knocking the boy’s spirit out of his body. Efficient and brutal, but Ranka was never one to complain if the plan worked.

She held breath and counted to ten, found her inner peace while everyone squabbled over how weird Ichigo’s shift from living to shinigami was. “Ok, here we go. Activate: Sivka-Burka. Command: synchronize device. Profile set: Administrator. Stand-by: permissible. GPS location: always on. Battery saver mode: optimal. Confirmation… accepted.” Her phone chimed from her pocket.

One, two, three, four, five devices synchronized.

The sweet computer voice that did all her translation chirped in her ear. “Device synchronization complete. Your profile has been updated.”

Ranka let out a sigh of relief and flashed a quick thumbs-up at Urahara. “We’re golden, Boss. Let’s rock this dog and pony show.”

Orihime squealed with joy. “Oh! I can hear her!”

Ichigo rubbed at his ear and winced. “Yup, got that loud and clear.”

A low clapping caught all of their attention as Urahara spoke. “Everyone! Eyes over here! I will now explain the gate!”

Basically, Urahara had mashed together two things that never needed to be in the same place, glued them together with strips of paper every single person in the Shoten had been made to copy by hand, and called it a success. The idea was that the normal gate was upgraded with a spirit-particle conversion machine that would take their physical selves (and all their stuff, because Ranka had asked that one early into its construction) and convert them into spiritual energy. That way they could all still function like normal without all the pesky problems being alive could have caused.

The only problem was that they only had four minutes to run through from one side of the gate to the other.

Ranka was not going to _survive_ that.

She gulped, apparently loudly enough that everyone on her network turned to look at her with concern. “Are you alright,” inquired the gentle rumble of the mountain of a teenager to her left. He still looked like he wanted to pat her on the head, but now it was out of concern.

Urahara snapped open his fan. “Little Miss Nome isn’t going to be able to make that run.”

Ranka sighed and raised her hand. “I can’t breathe properly. So I can’t run very well.” Embarrassing, but that was a fact of life she had come to grips with early in her life. Sure, when she was older she had a greater lung capacity and had grown out of that particular affliction, but that wasn’t a thing she could look forward to for another six years at best.

Chad nodded. “I can carry you.” Ranka couldn’t help but look up at him with tears in her eyes. “You’re small.” She nodded emphatically up at him and almost died with joy when he reached an arm out to carry her. He nodded down at her and she nodded back up at him, and on the spot Ranka decided Chad was her new favorite.

Yoruichi jumped down from her perch on Ranka’s shoulder and meowed at the group. “Have no doubt. Have no fear. Do not stop. Do not look back. Do not think of those you are leaving behind. Just… go forward.”

And nestled in Chad’s arms, Ranka remembered that the run through this particular gate did not end well.

Shit. This was going to suck.


	5. conversion_syntax_error

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to the Soul Society. Let's see if Ranka's plans are up to snuff.  
> Likewise, Google Translate should never be used as a primary method of communication.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know what. I got nothing at this point. I didn't even mean to do more than half of this chapter, but you know what... I'm just going to let my brain do its thing because I'm tired and Tired!Lace is apparently Plotting!Lace.

He threw her. This motherfucker had the actual testicular fortitude to _throw her_ out of the Dangai. She may have understood that avoiding the strange and terrifying entity that called the gap between worlds (if one could call it that) was tantamount to survival, but that did not mean she had to be thrown at the exit.

Weirdly, Ranka was thus the first one of the group to actually make it _into_ the Soul Society. This was nice, because it meant that Ranka had only needed to put one foot on the bone covered ground before the shockwave from Orihime’s ill-advised attempt to shield everyone from the cleaner carried her away.

Ranka did not remember the landing.

Well, she didn’t as long as Ichigo never asked.

As Ranka had unfortunately managed to be separate from everyone else, closer to the exit, and lower to the ground as well as much lighter, Ranka got to experience the full glory of landing close enough to the Soul Society walls that Ichigo triggered them and Ranka got to play ‘dodge the falling wall’ the extreme caterpillar edition.

Because that was what happened when you noticed that your designated small child had landed on the ground with their limbs flung out akimbo and red liquid spreading out beneath their head. You went and got them in order to salve their wounds and kiss them better while glaring daggers at whoever caused the problem in the first place. The only difficulty with that was that when Ichigo moved too close, the wall dropped.

Ranka took her first breath at a gasp and spat out blood after ripping her mask down, held her hat on her head as she sat up and scowled. Then she looked up and up, pulled herself to her shaking feet and stared. Numb fingers reached up to her phone and pressed the button on the side that she had set as a shortcut to activate the channel as she pulled her mask back up.

She turned it off just as quickly, ears ringing with the sheer volume at which Ichigo spoke. Ranka hadn’t even had it on long enough for her translator to kick in, but she recognized that panicked tone anywhere.

Kurosaki Ichigo had lost his charge. There were no words for exactly how lost she was.

But, Ranka was a goddamn adult. She could manage this. What was the worst that could happen? She died? Bit late for that one, wasn’t it? Oh no, what if she got lost and had to navigate the Seireitei all by herself until someone found her again? It wasn’t like she could just walk up to a shinigami at any point and request to be taken to their leader because she had invaded or anything. No, she didn’t have that option.

Ranka threw her head back and laughed until her tricorn fell off and she had to scramble to keep it out of the blood puddle on the pavement. She brushed the dirt from it with a snort, tapped at her hearing aids to make sure they were in, before she slapped the thing back atop her head. Well. She was here now.

Ahead of schedule and with a formerly shattered skull and broken neck, but she was definitely in the land of the shinigami.

The man that stood across from her, the one that looked like he was trying to decide between vomiting and summoning someone a pay-grade higher than he was, was enough proof of that. He stared at her, she stared back. He had his hand on the hilt of his sword, she had a hand on her hat. Slow as molasses in winter, she lowered her hand and raised her arms in the universal gesture of ‘unarmed, do not attack’.

Ranka gulped. The shinigami did not take his hand off his sword. Carefully, she ran through her options. Surrender, obvious. Lie, obvious. Which lie? Unclear.

“Identify yourself,” the man said gruffly into the awful tension, at odds with the cheerful automated translation.

She resisted the urge to be the tiny bundle of sass that she was. “Sir, Lance Corporal Ranka Nome, UFS Brigade Fourth Marine Division, sir,” she barked out tersely and let the translation handle the rest.

His hand did not stray, and instead tightened. “Nome-heichou? Under whose authorization have you entered the Seireitei?”

That was… a really good question that did not have answer that was not a lie. Well, go big or go home. “Sir, my orders were to report directly to the Eleventh Division. I have my orders if you’d like to see them, sir.” Watching him blink in confusion was an absolute joy of an experience that Ranka would highly recommend to anyone invading the Seireitei.

He cleared his throat and muttered to himself, something so low and fast that her hearing aids couldn’t pick up the words enough to translate them. When he spoke up again, he had the grace to at least take his hand off his zanpakuto’s hilt. “Let me see them.”

Gingerly, she reached her hand to her pocket and pulled out the familiar floral monochrome and pink device. He watched her like a hawk and she tapped away at the screen to pull open her documents viewer. God bless Urahara Kisuke and his thorough soul. He had labelled each one clearly and in such a way that it even read like military documents. She tapped the icon that said ‘PCS orders’ and flipped her phone around, both hands around it as she bowed low like it was some sort of offering to a pagan god.

Or handing over a business card, but really no one would ever know. The blood from her ill-fortuned impact against the ground trickled down her face until it reached the bridge of her nose, and Ranka couldn’t help but wrinkle her nose to keep from sneezing.

The shinigami stepped closer. “Don’t try anything stupid, Nome-heichou,” he warned as he took her phone in his much larger hand. There was a long moment as he scanned the page. “How…”

“Sir, flick gently up with your finger to scroll, sir.”

He cleared his throat. “Thank you, Nome-heichou.” Her back ached, so she took a slow step back and settled herself into what was known as parade rest. Ranka clasped her hands at the small of her back, kept her feet squared shoulder width apart, and locked her eyes on the tattoo across the shinigami’s face. He read her fake order and she tried to think of happier things in order to avoid panicking.

Her orders were forged by a former captain of the Gotei 13. If there was anyone who knew what a formal transfer order from organization to organization looked like, it would be Urahara Kisuke.

So she kept herself busy by imagining a French bulldog puppy that couldn’t roll back over onto its stomach from its back. There was nothing more zen than baby animals trying to do things with their utmost enthusiasm.

He kept flicking through the pages at an almost glacial rate. So Ranka kept thinking of cute animals and avoided locking her knees. If she locked her knees, she would pass out. Passing out at parade rest was a rookie mistake. Her father had used to bet between his new soldiers and his daughters as to who could keep parade rest longer. Ranka and her sister had _always_ won. As long as she avoided passing out, then she could pass muster as a seasoned soldier. Or at least a soldier fresh out of whatever passed for a military academy in the UFS Brigades.

Ranka missed watching Ichigo pummel the shit out of whoever was guarding the gate for this, so she kind of hoped the shinigami got his reading done quickly.

“Nome-heichou.” She snapped herself to attention, back straight, arms at her sides, feet with heels together in a swift clicking maneuver and toes just a little turned out.

“Sir, yes, sir,” she barked out.

The shinigami waved his hand. “Ah, at ease, Nome-heichou. Any reason why your orders are for last week and you just showed up today?”

Ranka couldn’t help but blush and roll her eyes skyward. “Sir, permission to speak freely, sir.”

He waved his hand, brows furrowed with irritation. “Granted. Happily. Will that stop the robot voice? Or is that honestly just you?”

Success! Ranka grinned behind her mask. “Do you speak English?”

The man crossed his arms over his chest, and the woman inside the body of a girl had to appreciate the aesthetics of watching those arms do anything at all. “I’m a lieutenant in the Gotei 13. It’s mandatory,” he said in slightly accented English.

Ranka let out a sigh. “Sivka-Burka. Terminate translation program.” She waited for the beep in her hearing aids before she commenced speaking. Ranka kind of hated her voice as a child. Sure, she had grown up with a voice that sounded like a child over the phone, but when she was an actual child she just sounded… adorable. No one had ever taken her seriously until she had used her so-called ten dollar vocabulary words. “Thank you.”

The man did a double take. “Holy shit.”

“Sir?” She couldn’t help but tilt her head slightly as she questioned him. “Is something the matter?”

“Ah… no. Carry on.” He pressed his hand against his face like he needed to hide his expression, and Ranka had a sneaking suspicion that he was smiling at her.

Did that mean that he was just as weak to small children as the little old people of Karakura Town? Because Ranka was not above milking that for all it was worth. That was how you got people to buy you things you really didn’t need like teddy bears and new switchblades. She raised her arm in an aborted salute, and scuffed the toe of her boot against the ground. “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. I… um… I kind of… got lost.” he voice trailed off as she spoke, fingers coming forward to tap at each other while she scuffed the ground and lowered her head. “I’m really sorry, sir…”

“You. Got lost. From the UFS to Seireitei,” he said levelly. “So how exactly did you get here?”

Ranka kicked at the ground some more. “I… met this really nice bunch of people who said they were going to go to the Seireitei and I asked them!”

Hisagi apparently had a much better temper than anyone she had ever met. “You got lost. So you asked a bunch of strangers to go with them. Do you know _why_ that group of strangers wanted to go to the Seireitei?”

“No? But one of them was in your uniform? So I thought he was just a really nice soul reaper who got stuck playing ferry boat. Was I… not supposed to?” Careful, careful. Bury your lies by telling the truth. Technically, Kurosaki Ichigo was a soul reaper. He just didn’t belong to the Gotei 13 quite yet. He would, eventually. But right now he just had the sword and the uniform, but not much else. Technically, all the kids were a bunch of strangers. Except for Ichigo.

Ichigo was the main character. All suffering was his fault by default.

The shinigami took a moment to close his eyes and probably pray. “No. No you were not supposed to just go with a random bunch of strangers. Did you at least ask for identification?”

“Ichi-nii! He was really nice. He bought me this candy that looked like little stars and it was all sweet and amazing-”

He cut her off with a growl. “Nome-heichou… no. You can’t do that. You absolutely cannot take candy from strangers. Or follow them anywhere.”

Ranka made a soft little gasp. “Oooooh… so I did something bad? Was Ichi-nii bad? Was I supposed to hit him in his no-no square like Mama says? Oh. Wait. You’re a stranger. Stranger!” She gave a little shriek and jumped backwards, tiny fists curling up near her face as Ranka tried her level best to look like some incompetent little child.

“Woah now! I’m Hisagi. Lieutenant Shuuhei Hisagi of the Ninth Division. I am not going to fight you.” He held his arms out in a placating gesture, before remembering that he still had her weird little device in his hand. “Here, have  your… thing back.” Hisagi wiggled it invitingly between his fingers, close to where the top of her head should have been.

Ranka rubbed her face and squinted her eyes. “I don’t trust you. You’re a stranger.”

“I am not a stranger.”

“You said I was wrong because I listened to a stranger. So I’m not listening to you.” Ranka had zero compunctions about behaving like her bratty niece, complete with foot stomping, arm crossing, and turning her head away with a sniff.

Hisagi sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “Here. Look.” He held out his left arm and gestured to it. “See that? You should know what that is. Can’t fake those in Seireitei.”

Ranka narrowed her eyes and glared. “So. You’re a lieutenant. That doesn’t mean you aren’t a stranger.”

He hissed through his teeth, low enough that she wouldn’t have caught it if she wasn’t paying attention. Check and mate. Gotcha, sucker. “I’m not a stranger,” he repeated. “I’m Lieutenant Shuuhei Hisagi. And I’m the one who is going to take you to your new division.” Unspoken was the part where if he took Ranka to the Eleventh, she would no longer be his problem. The Eleventh had enough practice with small children; what was one more to the mix.

“You said not to go anywhere with strangers,” Ranka reminded him.

If Hisagi had less self-control or was a worse person, he probably would have punted her by now. She was small enough compared to him. “... They have candy.”

Ranka perked up and clapped her hands. “Yay!” She dashed forward and took her phone, tiny fingers tapping at it. “You’re my new bestest friend!” Ranka moved to hug his leg, then danced back and waved her hands at him in negation. “No, sorry, sir! I’m really sorry. I got too friendly, huh, sir.” She snapped a salute and slid smoothly back into parade rest. “Sir, at your command, sir!”

Hisagi nodded slowly. “Just… remember to be respectful of those who outrank you. I don’t know how they operate where you’re from, but at least remember that. Come on, Nome-heichou.”

Ranka snapped another quick salute. “Sir, yes Lieutenant Hisagi, sir!”

He wave his hand at her in a come hither motion. “Have you figured out how to flash step yet?”

Ranka blinked very slowly. There was no way to explain ‘I have no spiritual powers Hot Arm Guy (trademark pending), so no’ without blowing her entire ridiculous cover story right out of the water. “Sir, no, sir!”

A quick nod of his head and she fell neatly into step behind him, walking at the fastest rate her little legs and tiny lungs could manage. She had to remember that she wasn’t twenty-six anymore, couldn’t just speed walk all over creation in order to keep up with the people who had so many unfair height advantages over her. Lieutenant Hisagi was even considerate enough to point out helpful landmarks for her, said the word for it in English and then in Japanese so she could parrot it back to him. If she was just her actual age, this would probably have been a much more pleasant walk than it was.

Eventually he stopped and looked down at her. “Nome-heichou. According to your orders, because of your last mission you were rendered incapable of utilizing the traditional methodology of your land’s reapers. Is that correct?” He sounded weird when he was being all formal, but Ranka would still be the first person to sign up for the Hisagi Shuuhei Appreciation Club.

She nodded. “Sir, yes, sir. I can’t… I can’t _reap_ anything anymore. So Papa helped me transfer here. So I could be better and stronger, sir.”

A gentle hand rested on her hat, squishing against the blood in her hair. Thankfully he hadn’t noticed. “Nome-heichou. This… if this isn’t the right fit for you, you don’t have to stay. You can transfer to another division.”

Ranka crinkled her eyes at him as she smiled. “Sir, thank you for your concern, sir! I’ll be ok. I’ll make lots of friends and get really strong, sir!”

All she got was a sigh and a jerk of Hisagi’s head. “Right. There’s your new division then. Show them your orders, don’t take any lip from anyone. The Eleventh respects strength. Got it?”

Ranka bowed, pulling out the good manners Tessai had drilled into her. “Sir, yes, sir! Papa said ‘balls and sass’. I can do balls and sass, sir.” Oh, Hisagi had no idea how much sass she could summon. There were oceans of words at her disposal, but she was fine with using the littlest of them to dupe Hisagi. “I’ll just act like my Mama, sir. She’s really strong.”

She was rewarded with a tiny smile and an even smaller smile. “Good luck, Lance Corporal Ranka Nome. I look forward to seeing you grow.”

Ranka blinked as he waved once more and literally disappeared right in front of her eyes. “Huh. Handy. Speedy little fucker itn’t he?” She rolled her shoulders and stretched her arms in front of her to crack her fingers in a series of little pops. “Ok. I have got this. Dodge the sword, punch in the balls, stab in eyes. Kick ‘em while they’re down. If get sword… pointy end goes in bastard.”

She hopped up and down a few times to get her blood flowing and some sort of color back in her cheeks, and Ranka went straight for the gates before she could second guess herself.

 

\----------

 

“Allow me to see if I understand this correctly. You want to transfer… from the UFS Brigades… to the Eleventh Division of the Gotei 13.” The man in front of her rubbed at his forehead, desperate to prevent wrinkles. “You… have no combat training. Because you’re not actually a combatant. And you want to join a division devoted to combat… why?”

Ranka didn’t want to glare at the nice shinigami who had single-handedly scooped her up and carted her off the moment she set foot in the gates and said the magical words of ‘I want to join this division’. His friend looked like he wanted nothing more than to laugh himself into oblivion, but was gamely trying not to if only to save the nice shinigami the embarrassment.

“Because I want to learn how to fuck people up?” Ranka shrugged and eyed the bald shinigami’s sake jar with a more than passing interest. Maybe he had lax enough morals to let a child drink. She’d never know if she didn’t try.

The pretty shinigami man sighed into his palms. “This is all our lieutenant’s fault. And don’t laugh Ikkaku. Want to give me the real reason? Without trying to pretend to be adorable, if you’d please. Lying isn’t very beautiful.”

Ranka blinked slowly. “Because your division was the least likely to ask questions?”

Ikkaku burst out laughing, only to stop when Yumichika glared at him. “Changed your story really fast there.”

She winced behind her mask. It was still so strange to hear people say one thing and then let the cheerful translation pick up on the words she didn’t know (of which there were many) and drown out the ends of every sentence. “There’s no real point in lying. I’m not going back. You can’t make me.” One tiny finger tapped against the wood of the quasi-porch they were all sitting on, tried to emphasize her point and failed miserably.

Ranka took a strange joy out of seeing one Ayasegawa Yumichika visibly pray for patience. “Ranka-chan. You could get hurt here. You don’t even have a sword. This is a division that _specializes_ in swords. Can you see the problem here?”

She stared him dead in the eye. “You don’t know me. I could be awesome.” Ranka really wasn’t. What she was, was desperate and stranded. All the knowledge in the world would serve no one if she couldn’t manage to make her way back to them or vice versa.

Ikkaku cackled as he sipped at his sake. “She’s got you there. It’s still not a place for you, kid.”

“Ah, yes. The great lord himself has spoken.” She blinked languidly and turned her head slowly in order to stare him down before continuing on in sharp English. “Please, continue drinking so recklessly before the sun goes down. It’s recommended for men over the age of Methuselah to imbibe at least one glass of wine a day in order to maintain the dignity of their trophy wives.” Ranka said it with a smile and a cheerful chirp in her speedily mumbled voice, used her tested and tried so-called customer service mode as she drummed her fingers on the porch edge.

The two shinigami before her stared uncomprehendingly. Yumichika cleared his throat. “What Ikkaku is trying to say is that this isn’t the division for you.” He flipped his hair in what he probably thought was a beautiful gesture, but Ranka took as sheer vanity. Not that he didn’t deserve that vanity, what with all the work he put into maintaining his perfect face. “Now, we can probably keep you here for a bit, but you’re going to have to impress the Captain.”

Oh. Oh shit. Ranka had really not thought this plan through enough. Impress Kenpachi Zaraki? Was he mad? Tiny children did not make for impressive fighters. Yachiru, bless her little soul, didn’t even count as a tiny child. What with her true identity and terrifying skills and all. Ranka gulped. “Oh. He’s going to send me away.”

She didn’t even have to think of kicked puppies to cry. No, these were honest tears. Tears that only a child who knew their hopes and dreams were going to be crushed could manage. Ranka sniffed and ducked her head, clenched her hands on her knees and tried to breathe in such a way that the hitch in her breath couldn’t be heard.

She failed.

Ranka failed so badly that she was swiftly bundled up into someone’s arms and that someone moved with a purpose. Panic was not a thing that the Eleventh did. When in doubt: find someone who could deal with the problem.

“Shit shit shit, don’t cry. Seriously, don’t cry!” Shaking children did not make them stop crying. Shaking them hard enough that their head flopped on their shoulders only led to brain trauma and made the crying worse. Clearly Madarame Ikkaku had not been graced with the presence of real small children. Then again, this was the Eleventh. The only child they interacted with was the tiny pink terror.

The tiny pink terror did not cry. She laughed in the face of slaughter, giggled at the unknown, and was generally an unholy sugar gremlin.

Ranka was not even remotely of the same breed of child that was one Kusajishi Yachiru.

Some distant part of her brain had recognized that it was Ikkaku holding her. That same part of her brain reported to the higher functioning areas of this simple fact, and Ranka came to the startling and beautiful realization that the bottle of sake was sitting unattended less than two feet to her left. If she made a pathetic screech at this realization, no one would ever believe the two shinigami involved in her moment of brilliance. Ranka had entirely forgotten how _shrill_ she could get when she was small, and she put her malformed lungs and diaphragm muscles to use.

Skip the bass, proceed straight up the scales to a pitch no one alive should have right in their ears, then drag out the sound until it echoed. Ikkaku clapped his hands on his ears and Yumichika winced away from her, and Ranka had her moment.

Sake bottle in hand after one desperate lunge, she settled herself back in front of Ikkaku while she dug out the straw she was supposed to only use for her liquid dinners and medicine with a shivering hiccup. She cried, in sad little gasps muffled by the fabric of her mask, and neatly inserted the straw into the appropriate holes.

Alcohol was always good at drowning out sorrow.

What was in her mouth was _not alcohol_ by any stretch of the imagination. She took one hearty pull on the straw and promptly pulled her mask down, straw and all, to drool it out onto the wood. That was not alcohol.

Ikkaku drank drain cleaner disguised in a sake bottle and chugged it like it was water. Her estimation of his liver ratcheted up several notches. Lucky did not even begin to describe his survival.

He snatched the bottle from her hands with a shout as Yumichika burst out laughing. “Hey! That’s not for little kids!”

“Gross. Gross. Gross.” She stuck her tongue out and scraped it clean with her teeth, wincing as it dragged against the sharp edges. Ranka gagged and scrambled to spit out on the packed dirt that formed the kitchen courtyard. “Gross. So disgusting. Why would you drink that?”

Ikkaku glared at her as he stood with the bottle held out of her reach and behind him. “It wasn’t for you, brat! Damn it, so unlucky!”

Yumichika was no help, not dying of laughter as he was. Ranka gagged once more and slipped her mask back in place. She’d taken a breath too many without her filters, and she slipped one of her few emergency medical vials out of the little folded cloth packet Urahara had slipped into her uniform’s leather pouch instead of something useless like candy. It was designed to screw straight into one of her mask’s ports to be breathed in until the green liquid was gone.  She slid on her knees until she could reach her arm down and grab for her boots.

“Ah? And where do you think you’re going?” It took a moment for Yumichika to collect enough presence of mind to formulate words, and by then Ranka had a whole boot halfway on and Ikkaku had proceeded to mourn his lost drain cleaner so weirdly that the translator couldn’t pick it up.

Ranka shrugged, tiny fingers deftly lacing and folding her boot just so. “I am going to go ask the Captain if I can stay the night. And then I’m going to find somewhere else that will sign my orders.” Bless Urahara and his paranoid heart. Her faked orders were less of actual proper military orders and more like a glorified letter of introduction with the _option_ for another division to initiate the request to formally request the transfer of the fictional entity known as ‘Lance Corporal Ranka Nome’.

It was just a shame that the request would end up ignored as spam mail by the proper authorities. Really. An absolute shame. And that was even if Ranka could be persuaded to cough up the supposed proper information. But legally, an attempt could be made.

Ranka finished putting her boots on in the time it took Ikkaku and Yumichika to have a whispered conversation behind her back. They spoke so low and heatedly that even Ranka could tell they were disagreeing on something and Yumichika had clearly browbeaten Ikkaku into going along with something. But Ranka really didn’t care. She had a bigger target to worry about. Probably the biggest target in the history of anything.

Kenpachi Zaraki was not stupid. She’d fight anyone who said otherwise. Lack of skill at determining directions did not instantly equate to stupidity. If anything, the man was infinitely more intelligent than people gave him credit for and simply craved battle as a method of validating his existence. Plus, to him it was the ultimate hobby and high in one simple package. She could understand that. The Ranka of before had the same opinion about her sinful lifestyle, the one that she had been forced to abandon because-

That way lay madness.

She hopped to her feet and pulled her hat from her head, fingers combing through her bangs to knock the dried blood loose so she could at least _pretend_ to be presentable. The two shinigami behind her had gone quiet, and she turned her head to stare at them. “What is it?”

For a long moment, neither of them said anything at all. Gently, almost like he was afraid she was going to break down into tears again if he pried, Ikkaku opened his mouth and asked a question she didn’t really want to answer. “What happened?”

Ranka slapped her hat back on her head and shrugged. “I fell.” Not technically a lie. She had fallen. It had just been from the sky after being violently evicted from the Dangai. “I got hurt. I got better.” Also not technically lying.

Yumichika and Ikkaku stared at her. “You… fell. And then you got better,” inquired Yumichika with a careful blandness.

Ranka nodded. “Yes.” She rolled her eyes like they had taken leave of their senses and forgotten a basic fact of the universe. “That’s what happens when you fall down. You get better.”

The two older spirits exchanged an entire conversation before they both spoke simultaneously with a strangled panic. “That’s not what happens when you fall down!”

Ranka stared at them. “Yes. Yes it is. I just heal fast.” She pulled her hat down in a gesture she would never admit that she had stolen wholesale from Urahara at his most annoying. “Papa said that was what made me scary.” Not even remotely a lie that time. Urahara had been the most adamant proponent that Ranka’s inability to die properly could possibly lead to more mental issues down the line than anyone was prepared to deal with. He had even warned her about it. If she stopped looking at dying as something _bad_  or _permanent,_ Ranka was supposed to stop whatever it was she was doing and go hide in a corner until the plot passed her by. She wasn’t even supposed to play the puppet game if she started getting that feeling when she looked at Ichigo.

Which was ridiculous. Ichigo was a cockroach. You couldn’t just kill off the main character.

Ranka turned neatly on her heels and gave a proper salute to the two. “Thank you very much for your care.” She waited until Ikkaku snapped a sketchy salute back before she snapped her arm back down with military precision. Ranka made it past the lines of hanging laundry before she realized that she had far too much shade than her tricorn gave her. And when she looked up, there they were. Ikkaku on  her left and Yumichika on her right.

“We’ll take you to the Captain, little missy.” Ikkaku matched his pace to hers, his much longer legs forced to short strides in order to keep from outpacing her. Ranka rather appreciated that, but had a feeling he wasn’t doing it so much out of politeness as he was terror that Yumichika would make his life a living hell for making him ruin his perfect hair this early in the day.

 

\----------

 

Holy. Shit. The Eleventh Division was full of gossiping fishwives masquerading as rugged thugs. The impromptu trio hadn’t even made it through the building proper before the whispers had started. Heads hung out of doorways that stank of old liquor and sweat, men flocked behind them until there was a veritable herd of noisy idiots.

Off to see the Captain indeed. Because this was exactly the kind of trip that deserved a yellow brick road and a tiny little dog. Though, Ranka wouldn’t mind having a tiny little dog. God she hoped someone was feeding hers while she was away on this terrible excuse for a vacation.

The walk to the lair of Kenpachi Zaraki had turned into a procession and it wasn’t even Ranka’s fault. She hadn’t even been paying attention to most of it, messing around with her phone’s text-to-speech as she was. There had to be a better way to optimize the eclectic collection that formed her network of earpieces and microphones.

God, she’d kill someone for a keyboard and a real computer at this point.

Or, as the case would most likely be, she was going to get killed before she even reached a computer. So she typed out her brief message in the chat app and let the text-to-speech fill her wayward children in that she was completely fine and making new friends who liked to punch things in the face and get drunk. Ranka was fine, so she would really appreciate it if they could all just get Ichigo to please stop trying to talk about her like she was a lost child or a damsel in distress.

Ranka had this handled.

Hopefully.

Ranka was of the firm opinion that she could probably get along with the Eleventh like a house on fire if they let her stay. As long as no one pressed a sword into her hand and told her to go at it, she would be fine. She had always gotten along like a house on fire with burly tattooed men of all kinds and had a feeling deep in her bones that this wouldn’t end up any different. If she tried her best, the woman now called Ranka could have them eating out of the palm of her hand.

On a moral level, Ranka was aware that what she was doing was incredibly awful. Two wrongs did not make a right, no matter how good the intentions were that paved the path to Hell. That was a basic truth of life and not even Ranka was exempt.

It should have made her sick to her stomach, skin prickled and mouth dry. Instead she only smiled behind her mask and shoved the woman she was before into a neat little box, slammed the lid and locked it up tight to be forgotten about. Ranka wanted to go home, needed to go home more than life itself. This was a universe fated to spiral into plans she had no business in, unfold in the quiet dark afterlife and spread until the world choked on its complexity. But there was no place in that plot for one Ranka Nome.

An animal trapped in a corner would do anything to get out.

Ranka smiled and carefully buried her intelligence in a box next to who she had been before (or was it could be in fifteen years, she couldn’t ever get a straight answer from Urahara on it). She needed to be small, adorable, honorable, and utterly unfazed by the prospect of a slaughter.

She remembered what it felt like to hold a human’s insides in her hands, and Ranka blanched behind her mask. Urahara had said she couldn’t pull this off. Well, Urahara had never met a Nome before. Nomes operated out of sheer _spite_ and _madness,_ danced the knife thin edge of sanity and _did what needed to be done no matter what._

Ranka was her father’s daughter, all honor and military strategy. But she was her mother’s daughter too, and she could and would wrap her tiny little fingers around her target’s hearts and pull until they danced to her tune. Ranka didn’t have to like it.

She just needed to suck it up and _do it._

All she had to do was make them like her enough to keep her for literally a day and a half. It didn’t matter what they did during that day and a half, so long as they didn’t turn her over to Aizen’s faction or the Twelfth Division. She could even tolerate it if they put her in a prison cell or bound up her ‘powers’ with kido. It wasn’t like she had any actual experience in needing spiritual energy to do much of anything. A day and a half, and then she could literally just page one of Ichigo’s ilk to come bust her out.

Uryuu would probably get a huge kick out of blowing a giant hole in a wall.

But that sort of plan was only an option after everything from plans alpha through foxtrot. She’d really just prefer if they let her stay.

If Ranka had to sign up for a sleepover from hell with the pink terror… fine. She needed an excuse to cut off all her hair anyway. Yoruichi and the Urahara Shoten staff could go fornicate vigorously with desiccated cacti for all she cared. It was her hair and she did what she wanted.

The crowd of shinigami and a liar stopped in front of a pair of doors that there was no way Ranka would ever be able to open on her own. Not even twenty-six year old whatever-her-name-was had the upper or lower body strength to move those wooden gates. She only knew that because those were the front gates she had failed at opening for so long that Ikkaku and Yumichika had needed to save her from them.

Yumichika crouched down on his knees and clasped his hands on her shoulders. “Listen very carefully, Nome-chan. You’re going to need to immediately challenge Zaraki Kenpachi.”

What. That… did not seem like it was a good plan.

Ikkaku and the rest of the Eleventh who had clustered around her nodded like it was the best thing since the invention of sliced bread and triple distilled vodka. Ranka blanched even further. This was really, really not according to plan. She opened her mouth and closed it a few times with rapidly increasing panic. “What?”

Yumichika gripped harder. “You have dim prospects.”

She stared harder before she shakily raised her hand to tap at her phone screen. Ok. This was really, _really_ not a thing she planned for. Quick fingers typed and typed, erased and rewrote. She sent it straight to Yoruichi and prayed.

The gruff voice in her ear was met with silence from all the children they had escorted. “You have no chance in hell. Run.”

Right. Yes. Thank you so much, that was helpful. Ranka wanted to scream and pull out all her hair, settled for biting her lip so hard it bled. “Ok. I understand.” She took a deep breath for courage and slipped her hands into her pockets so she could pull her back straight and put her iron will to work. “I challenge Kenpachi Zaraki.”

It didn’t feel right. The way the words came out of the translation and the way the blood rushed out of the faces of a few of the shinigami before her. Yumichika hissed and slapped his hands across her cheeks. Accidentally blocked her ports and Ranka choked on her exhale until he moved them. “That wasn’t what I said!”

Something was coming. Something that made every hair on her arms stand up, her skin to prickle, and every fiber of her being began to scream that Ranka needed to be gone _yesterday._

Something was _already here_ and Ranka had missed her chance.

She stared up and up until her neck threatened to break and she had to slam her hand to her hat to keep it on her head.

Oh. _Shit._ Kenpachi was _huge_ and he had his sword out and a bloodthirsty grin on his face and Ranka was going to _die_ and it was all _Ayasegawa Yumichika’s_ fault because she would never have said it if he hadn’t told her to-

She couldn’t breathe, chest gone cold and she couldn’t keep from coughing. Air, she needed air. Quick fingers went to her mask and ripped it down just in time to gulp in once and jerk to the side to avoid spraying anyone with the watery foam that was all she could vomit up. Ranka dry heaved onto the pavement and the terror took a single step back until it was just manageable enough for her to _stop_ and Urahara had never told her it would be like _this._

“Who challenges me,” asked the mountain that lived to murder.

And up went her shaky hand, because lying was pointless in the face of the inevitable. “I did,” she enunciated as clearly in Japanese as she could around her panic and dry heaving.

Down, down, down, stared the man with the bells in his hair and the eyepatch with teeth that ate away at his reiatsu. Up, up, up, went whatever Ranka had eaten for lunch that day. And he laughed. “Well let’s see it then.”

She spat once and the Eleventh did her the courtesy of pretending she hadn’t just thrown up over their front doorway. And up went her mask, out came her phone. “I challenge you for a place in the Eleventh Division.” She shook like a leaf and clutched her phone to her breast. Ranka spoke in clear English, drowned out her translation and made Yumichika look at her like she had grown a second head. “Sivka-Burka, disconnect from network.” The chiming beep in her ears was like a balm to her shaking soul. At least when she died, no one would be able to hear it. “Restrict access. Time lock for twenty-five minutes. Productivity mode engaged.”

He had his zanpakuto out already, so Ranka already knew what she was expected to do. But Ranka didn’t have a sword. Ranka had a three-inch folding knife against a sword that was probably as long as she was tall.

“Saa… hajimeyouka?”

Courage. She had to have courage, the brass balls to step up to the plate even though she knew damn well that she was going to die. Ranka could not _survive_ this. She knew it in her bones and it resonated in her soul. But she didn’t actually _need to survive_ it, or at least the rational part of brain reminded her. All she needed to do was be impressive.

Ranka was not impressive.

Ranka was a little manipulative shit.

She couldn’t understand what any of the shinigami around her said, but it didn’t matter. Ranka had locked eyes with one Zaraki Kenpachi and her fate was sealed. Shaking fingers reached out to pass her phone to the one person in the entire division who could be trusted with something that delicate. She passed him her phone and her hat, and after a moment took off her belt pouch and handed that to him too. It wasn’t like there was anything in there that Yumichika could get into trouble with.

Ranka pulled out her tiny little knife from where she kept it strapped to her leg under her duck gaiters, flicked it open and closed her eyes to take a steadying breath.

Chip damage. Treat it like a boss battle and focus on the scratch damage. It wasn’t like she could even really hurt him.

He laughed and hunkered down to stare directly in her eyes. Kenpachi said something she couldn’t understand, and she frowned and pointed one shaking finger at her phone. “Gomen nasai. Wakarimasen.” He frowned at her and said something else, only this time in the general direction of Yumichika.

Yumichika said something back, every line of his body frustrated. Ikkaku said something else, and the three of them started arguing over her head.

“Oh what the actual fuck. Hey! Fuckwits!” She shrugged out of her coat and pulled off all the nice pieces of her uniform that she really couldn’t afford to replace from the top down and threw them at Yumichika. He said something that she really didn’t care to comprehend and she flipped him the bird with a shaking hand. “Let’s get this over with before I lose what fucking nerve I have.”

Apparently her indignant squeaking, and oh how Ranka _could not wait for puberty_ to kindly take effect and give her at least some bass and dignity, was enough to set Kenpachi off into laughter. He still smiled at her like a bloodthirsty maniac, and she neatly sidestepped her way out of the reach of the shinigami who would have loved to stop her. They weren’t her parents or her keepers, and Ranka just wanted to get this over with.

Yumichika was grousing over how something ‘nozomishidai’ was not ‘chousen’, and he was doing it at volumes that were nothing but a distraction as she only understood the general gist of what he said. “Well fuck that.” She grit her teeth and flipped her little knife so the blade edge was away from her and her thumb pressed against the end of the little handle. Ranka was well aware she moved like molasses compared to actual people Kenpachi challenged himself with.

But she knew the basics. Keep feet firm on the ground, bounce on your toes, make every hit count. Go for the arteries and make your size _count_ for something useful instead of the hindrance it normally was.

Theory was so very lovely, but Ranka only understood the basic theory and not the practical application. Master Tessai was going to have a fit when Yoruichi told him about what stupid things Ranka had done while away from the tender loving guidance of her teacher.

Treat it like a particularly awful version of Dance Dance Revolution and try not to think about how breathing was going to be an issue.

Kenpachi Zaraki was remarkably tolerant. He moved slow to keep her pace, and he moved his sword lazily to block every time she came close to scratching him. Ranka was glad he hadn’t slapped a hand on the top of her head and held her at arm’s length while he laughed. So she did appreciate that he was… sort of taking her seriously.

It was even kind of educational.

Master Tessai would be proud of her; she lasted a grand total of a single minute before Kenpachi hit just a little too hard.

She screamed like a siren when her arm broke, dropped her knife and had to snatch it up with her left hand while she rolled away. Damn Yumichika for his horrible plan. But Ururu had done _worse_ over the course of her three months from hell. A broken arm did not mean the fight stopped. So she got to her feet and tried not to think of how her chest ached, how her vision was getting spots, or how every breath she took was a knife to her heart that wasn’t ever going to be enough.

He waited for her to get up and try again. And under the watchful eyes of the Eleventh Division, Ranka got her ass handed to her on a battered silver platter.

Every time he knocked her away, she got back on her feet. It didn’t matter than each time took just a moment longer or that she swayed when she stood. What mattered was that she did get up again. Again and again, even as her body went numb and her skin was more bloody nicks and cuts than it was unmarked.

He avoided her face, so that was nice. Kind even, to leave what looked like a little girl a chance to grow up to be a beauty. She appreciated it.

Her vision was hazy and her body sluggish as she tried one more time to dodge under his sword and land just one hit.

But she was slow, too slow, and he was fast, too fast.

A single swing of Kenpachi Zaraki’s sword could level a mountain.

What was a little girl’s neck in the face of those odds?

Nothing at all.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: I check everything these people say in Google Translate and then flip it from Japanese to English or vice versa, and then double check with a dictionary to be on the safe side. This death? This was one I didn't even intend to occur but this is the logical conclusion to solely using Google Translate as a translation service. So the tally of Ranka's deaths is now:
> 
>  **Training with Ururu:** 5  
>  **Urahara's medical experimentation:** 2  
>  **Hollow related shenanigans:** 1  
>  **Physics:** 1  
>  **Kenpachi Zaraki:** 1  
>  **Total:** 10
> 
>  **Deaths Kurosaki Ichigo has seen:** 2  
>  **Death Kurosaki Ichigo could have prevented:** 2


	6. execution_protocol

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Eleventh are a bunch of drunk, superstitious thugs.  
> Or, Ranka has plotted her way into the deep end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're done with Nanowrimo! I am, sadly, going to take a break from this for awhile as I have burned out my little brain.  
> But I'm done! Awyis!

Ranka woke with something over her head and she sat up with a strangled scream, clawing it off with desperate fingers as she leaned over and hacked up a little puddle of blood and spit. Her mask was off, her head was bare, and someone had apparently moved her somewhere else.

Everyone was screaming.

Ranka was not actually aware that grown men could hit that particular decibel, let alone manage to sustain the sound until it caught on with another man and spread like a plague. Well, at least it was nice of them to move her out of the courtyard. For a bunch of supposed thugs, they did actually have some kindness in them.

Something sharp bit her in the back of her neck.

 

\----------

 

Ranka woke with a gasp, hand clutching at her heart. It hurt and hurt, but there was something itching at the back of her neck. She rubbed at it, coughed and rolled over to hack up something black and brown in the massive puddle of rust red liquid. Huh.

She was not aware men could make a sound like a deflating helium balloon. That was sort of useful information.

One of the men in black moved and something silver flashed in his hands. Huh. Her legs hurt.

She tried to pull them up and away from the sword in his hand, away from the man with the wild eyes. Ranka was not ashamed to say she cried, tried to drag herself away from him when her legs wouldn’t work.

Her legs didn’t come with her, and she screamed and screamed until the world went dark and cold as ice.

 

\----------

 

Ranka woke with a blink and a stifled gasp, bit her lip and kept her eyes screwed shut. Maybe if she just lay there and didn’t move, no one would notice. She could hope for a miracle. Not that she would get it with the way the cosmos processed her requests, but Ranka could pray for one anyway.

Something poked at her cheek and it was so hard not to move. It poked at her eye and she almost screamed when it blinked reflexively.

There was something draped over her face, something thicker than what had been on her head the last time. It blocked her ports and covered the stiff fabric-like substance that filtered her air, and she felt her lungs burn and burn as the light shining through her eyelids went hazy and dark. Some part of her mind registered that her limbs kicked and her fingers clawed, but whatever held the thing on her face down was made of unrelenting steel.

 

\----------

 

She didn’t make a sound, came to the world with a jolt and proceeded to roll over and run even as she coughed. Her feet slapped against the wooden floor, bare toes curling as she pulled her knees to her chest and tried her absolute best to flee with the cough bubbling on her lips.

Ranka didn’t get very far before a pair of iron bands clamped around her middle and lifted. She kicked and kicked, coughed and tried to get enough air to scream her head off. But whoever held her against their chest simply stood there with her in their arms, grunted once when a lucky elbow struck the side of their head. They squeezed a little tighter and murmured something that was probably meant to be comforting but she couldn’t understand enough to be calmed by it.

She bit down on a hand, teeth sharp enough to draw blood.

The arms only clung tighter.

A gentle chiming rang out in her ears, and everything seemed to snap into focus.

Mask, gone. Boots, gone. Uniform,  _ gone. _ Breathing, painful. Ranka may have once enjoyed the prospect of being held in a man’s arms like this, but that was then and this was now. And now, now Ranka was a tiny little eleven year old girl who didn’t need  _ anyone _ to look at her in any stage of nudity that wasn’t a licensed medical professional. Master Tessai wasn’t even allowed to look at her naked torso without a valid reason.

And here was this shinigami who had his hand on her skin and she gathered up her courage and air enough to wail like a banshee.

The sound echoed oddly through the room, doubled back on itself and looped until it made her hearing aids vibrate and her teeth ache. Ranka didn’t stop shrieking until the man holding her cursed and slapped a hand over her mouth.

And then she licked his palm, tasted the metallic salt and grimaced even as he grunted and dropped her.

She would have scrambled away if it wasn’t for the fact that he dropped her on her backside on the wooden slats and then proceeded to pull her hair. Ranka would not go quiet into this night, no thank you. The man reached above her head and did something she couldn’t quite see properly, and slapped some weird pink ring thing in her hands.

Many days in the care of Urahara Shoten had clued Ranka in on the fact that when presented with the weird pink leaf ring, do not question why and simply put it on before soap ended up in your eyes. She slipped her hair through without even thinking about it, shriek tapering down into a series of whimpers. Ranka was not entirely sure what was going on.

Warm water cascaded over her head, and Ranka clued in rather quickly.

“This is not how I wanted to spend my evening, really,” came the voice of the man behind her as he slapped a pile of something that smelled faintly of flowers into her hair and commenced with scrubbing. Ranka held her hands primly over all of the essential bits and hissed as he pulled on a particularly stubborn knot of blood and questionable organic matter. “Go wash the child, he says. Go get the  _ brains out of her hair, _ because you like doing those sorts of things. Fine. I’ll make you so beautiful your own mother won’t recognize you.”

Ranka purred when he applied nails to her scalp. Say what you wanted about Ayasegawa Yumichika, but he understood the concept of pampering one’s scalp to encourage growth. A distant part of her brain wondered if she could persuade him to possibly cut her hair off for her.

As he gently teased a comb through and made far too much commentary about how he was jealous of her hair, Ranka came to the realization that no he would not. He would, however, trim her split ends, which was nice of him.

Then up came a washcloth covered with soap and suds, and Ranka attempted to bolt.

She should have known better. Anyone who had practice at bathing the tiny pink terror could  _ clearly  _ handle her tiny asthmatic self. Ranka’s pathetic attempts to escape from the indignity of having someone else  _ bathe her _ were met with stoic and skilled silence. At one point, Ranka was pretty sure she ended up upside down while he scrubbed her feet and she got herself a wonderful eyeful of Yumichika’s ankles.

The water ran away rust red and brown, swirled down into the gaps in the wood slats, and he kept scrubbing until her skin glowed pink and the soap came away white. Then he dumped more hot water over her and repeated the process until the water came away clear without even the faintest traces of soap bubbles.

Ranka honestly considered that perfectly clean, at least by modern Western conventions. She was perfectly content with toweling herself dry at that point and running away into the night.

This was not to be.

Yumichika bundled her up under his arm like a sack of potatoes, his other hand holding onto the towel he had tied rather securely around himself.

Ranka was deeply tired of other people taking these kinds of liberties with her person.

 

\----------

 

They were staring at her. Freshly cleaned (and forced to soak in the bathtub with Yumi-fucking-chika himself) and changed into a uniform that very clearly belonged to the Demon Child, Ranka was made to sit in front of what appeared to be the combined mass of the Eleventh Division. They hollered and howled, talked to themselves far too quickly and frequently for her translation system to keep up. But they were all looking at her.

Ranka was quite pleased to know she was three entire inches taller than one Kusajishi Yachiru. She knew this because she got to look  _ down _ at someone for once, and Yachiru was far too quick to measure the difference with her hands.

“Yay! Zombie-chan looks much better now!” Yachiru danced around Ranka and the shinigami (if you could call her that) tried to hold Ranka’s hand in order to cement their supposed friendship. Ranka let her, eyes wide and breathing muffled by her slightly damp and much cleaner mask. “Zombie-chan should play with me later!”

Ranka nodded numbly. At this point she would tell the pink terror whatever it wanted to know, as long as it didn’t try to play tag with her. “Yes.”

Yachiru tilted her head and poked Ranka’s mouth. “You sound really funny, Zombie-chan!”

Now this she could handle. Ranka drummed her fingers against her mask and stared just a little bit down. “Automatic translation software.” She cleared her throat and pulled her mask down with two fingers, grinned with her sharp little teeth and winked at Yachiru. “I actually sound like this,” she cheekily sassed the murder sword in her lightly accented Southern American English.

Yachiru’s eyes lit up. “Do it again!”

Ranka shrugged and drawled in her best monotone impersonation of a Georgia Southern Belle. “Clever girl. Now what’s a girl like you doin’ in a place like this?” And then she slipped her mask back up and coughed gently. Ranka really needed to stop doing that before she fell over and died again. But Yachiru laughed and giggled, clapped her hands, and so the tickle in the back of her throat was worth it.

She’d promised Papa to keep her deaths to a minimum, after all.

Wait. Urahara wasn’t her actual father. But if she tried to focus on what her father looked like, why did she keep thinking he was blonde? Wait, of course he was. Ranka was the biracial child of a black woman and a white man. Simple logic.

Yachiru smacked Ranka’s cheeks between her palms. “Zombie-chan! Zombie-chan! You shouldn’t go wandering.”

The murmuring picked up, but Ranka could still hear Yachiru deep in her bones. It’s funny how she doesn’t sound as tinny as everyone else, that tiny sword that wears the skin of a little girl. Ranka understood her far more than she should have. Yachiru and Ranka were far too similar for it to be healthy.

She let her eyes crinkle as she reached out her hands to Yachiru. “Let’s be friends,” she said in the tiniest hush from the crowd. It was amazing what two small children could get away with while all the adults around them were having what they considered to be important things they as children couldn’t possibly hope to  understand.

Yachiru grinned and jumped up and down while she hopped around with Ranka pulled into her gravitational orbit. The two things that weren't really little girls at all hopped around in a circle. Yachiru said a string of syllables and Ranka parroted it back. She said it again and again until Ranka could say it back perfectly, and Ranka didn’t even care enough to question it.

Yubikiri genman uso tsuitara hari senbon nomasu.

Ranka was pretty sure someone in the crowd made a manfully executed rendition of a coo. Bunch of softies really.

They spun and spun until they giggled and Ranka had to stop to catch her breath. They flopped down and giggled some more until their giggles became laughter.

“Hey, Pinky Pie. Friends forever and ever, amen.” Ranka butted the side of her head, hair still damp even after Yumichika had gleefully had his way with it, against the side of Yachiru’s head. “Wanna know a secret?”

Yachiru nodded and tilted her head to catch Ranka’s whisper. “Tell me! Tell me!”

“You are the creepiest goddamn sentient sword,” she murmured as she pulled out her phone. Ranka held it so it was over both of their faces and slowly tapped in her passwords so Yachiru could learn them. Then she tapped on the tiny little icon for Google and a few keypad entries later, Yachiru was treated to the absolute joy of Google. “This man is a traitor. And I am here to fuck up his everything. Wanna help?”

Dear Aizen Sousuke: fuck you. All her hate, Ranka Nome.

Yachiru frowned and Ranka hit mute on her phone while she pulled up another page. God bless Google and the unfathomable reach of Sivka-Burka. God bless the tiny pink terror who  _ understood _ what Ranka was showing her.

Said tiny pink terror sat up with a bounce Ranka replicated later when she got to her own feet. “Ken-chan! Ken-chan! Zombie-chan knows where the fights are!”

On second thought, god  _ damn _ the tiny pink terror.

Every head in the room turned to stare at the two little girls and Ranka tried to shrink back into herself in order to avoid the sudden intense scrutiny. She failed, but one couldn’t say that she didn’t try. Yachiru pulled her to her feet and literally dragged Ranka across the floor to stand before the awe-inspiring might of one Kenpachi Zaraki.

Ranka couldn’t help but flinch when he raised a hand to take a sip of the sake in his hand. All she could think of was the smile on his face when he had cut her head off, and the sharp twist of his lips looked far too similar for her taste. But she doesn’t look away. No, Ranka puts her head back and squares her shoulders to stare him straight in the eyes.

Nomes did not run. Her Mama did not raise a god thrice damned coward. So Ranka stood her ground and clenched her fists so hard her nails bit into her palms. She would endure.

Zaraki tilted his head, bells in his hair jingling merrily enough to be a strange sort of soothing. He moved slowly, almost like he was deliberately making them chime. “Oh? You know where all the fights are?”

Ranka did not appreciate the incredulous look some of the larger members of the Eleventh gave her. But Kenpachi Zaraki… he looked at her like she was the second coming of the first man to make a sharp metal stick and jab it artistically into someone who owed him money. She could get behind that sort of logic. If it ended with her not getting killed again, Ranka was several kinds of on board with whatever plan Kenpachi Zaraki made.

She nodded dumbly, like words were failing her, and took a quiet little step behind Yachiru. Not that it mattered much, but Ranka appreciated the concept of a meat shield.

He bent down just enough to look her properly in the eyes, then patted the seat next to him. Ranka couldn’t help but raise a brow.

“Jesus  _ wept. _ What was in your water as a child? Because it did your body but  _ good, _ sir.” She had tried to keep her sass to herself, but for some reason the sight of the mountain in a nonviolent capacity just made her brain go unglued. It was not her fault she forgot she had a machine hooked up to her face that did her translations automatically. It was even further  _ not her fault _ that Ikkaku choked on his drain cleaner sake and needed someone to slap him on the back until his pipes were empty and air returned.

Ranka did not flinch when Zaraki began laughing, his head thrown back and every bell in his hair jingling madly. Instead, she blinked slowly and tried not to melt into the floor from shame. Well, she would have melted into the floor if she hadn’t been busy screaming internally.

“Really? Why the hell not, kid.” Oh no, she was not getting into this. This was a man who was entire exponential categories beyond what she could have even handled when she was physically older. What next? Was she going to start calling Ikkaku ‘your daughter calls me Daddy too’? Ranka frowned behind her mask. She wasn’t even sure if there was even a polite way to handle this one.

Zaraki pillowed his chin on the heel of his hand and looked her up and down, slow, and she wanted to die. “Hm. You might just be a looker when you grow up. Probably flat-chested though.”

“Oh fuck you! I had great breasts.” She couldn’t help it. Ranka let go of Yachiru’s hand and flipped Zaraki off, opened her mouth and let her usual vitriol free. It was kind of nice, not having to play cute and conniving… but then she remembered that she was  _ supposed _ to be being cute and conniving in the name of bending people to her will. She slapped her hands to her mouth and blushed.

Zaraki, Ikkaku, and Yumichika stopped drinking sake long enough to stare at her. The current Kenpachi raised and eyebrow, and his highest seating officers had to set their cups down and attempt to process it. It was Yumichika who said what they were all thinking. “Maybe it was another mistranslation?”

Yachiru had no such qualms and turned around to stare at Ranka. “Zombie-chan had big breasts?”

Fuck it. Ranka crossed her arms under her chest and nodded. “The best. Puberty will be worth it.”

The Eleventh Division did not know how to handle this information. Ranka, deftly pulled out her phone and tapped away before flipping it around do Yachiru could see the photo. “See? I was pretty badass, right?”

Yumichika and Ikkaku almost fell over themselves to shove Yachiru out of the way to look at the screen. Ranka blinked slowly and clicked the power button on the side just as they looked up. “Sorry, Pinky Pie only. Best friend status trumps all.” She slipped her phone back into the convenient depths of her borrowed uniform sleeves and smirked behind her mask. “Sorry. Not sorry.” Ranka flopped neatly onto the cushion Yumichika had vacated, slid it across the floor so she had at least an arm length of distance between her person and everyone else.

And every eye was on her as she stared at Kenpachi and he stared right back, amusement plain on his face. “You’re still too young for me, kid.”

Ranka shrugged. “It was worth a shot.” Then she snorted. ‘“Table it until puberty hits?” She wiggled her fingers and had the absolute pleasure of making Kenpachi laugh again. Mission success. Distraction complete.

Yachiru tilted her head and flopped down next to Ranka. The two of them were small enough that they could both fit on the vacated cushion, and there went that one random guy with his cooing again. “But does Zombie-chan not want to fight with Ken-chan? Zombie-chan looked like she was having fun.”

_ Gods damn the tiny pink terror. _ She cleared her throat and ignored how every pair of eyes was on her as the Eleventh held its breath. “It was interesting. But I’m not very good.” For some weird reason this made the Eleventh rank and file break into cheers and crack open more sake bottles than she could count.

Yachiru proceeded into a clingy hug, rubbed her cheek against what parts of Ranka’s cheek she could get to. “Yay! We’re gonna train you until you get better and get big again! It’ll be so much fun, Zombie-chan!”

Wait,  _ what _ did she just say? Ranka did a swift double take and had to pull out her phone to verify the logged translation entries. Yes, that did indeed appear to be what the pink hellion had actually said. They were going to  _ train _ her until she got big again. Oh god, that was going to be fifteen years of nothing but hell. The Eleventh looked far too enthusiastic about the prospect for her liking, and Ranka gulped.

“Hey, zombie. Fight me next time,” came the gravelling bass of the murder mountain two feet to her left. “You can’t die, so you’ll be fine.”

Not true. She would not be fine. “Dying is dying, Captain. I just happen to be a cockroach.”

Ranka was apparently exceptionally good at cracking jokes that Kenpachi Zaraki thought were funny. This would be a good skill, if it wasn’t combined with the fact that he thought of her as a convenient practice dummy.

 

\----------

 

There was no god, Buddha was a lie, and Satan had taken up residence somewhere near the left side of her ribcage. Apparently when the Eleventh said they would train you, they meant before the crack of dawn, right now, with no exceptions. Ranka had never actually been bodily thrown out of a bed before, let alone the futon she was sharing with Yachiru. Somehow she had become such besties with Yachiru that they were going to sleep in the same bed and run the same exercises and be even better friends.

She was just glad that her uniform was clean and dry so she could give Yachiru back hers. Ranka was not a fan of running around with sandals made out of what looked like the Soul Society’s answer to straw strapped on her feet. She’d take her boots, thank you very much.

Yachiru and Kenpachi had ditched them all for ‘important meetings’. Ranka would not be getting a break until they returned, and until then she was under strict orders from her new Captain to train like her life depended on it. Technically it did, but the Eleventh still thought her inability to have a death that permanently stuck was the greatest thing since the invention of the sword. So Ranka got to spend her morning getting the tar beat out of her by every willing low ranked shinigami in the division.

Lance Corporal Nome was not a fan of this, and had started just letting them run her through instead of waiting for bandages.

Ranka against the unseated was a strangely one-sided beat down. None of them had enough skill with their blades to make their zanpakuto a real advantage against Ranka’s Master Tessai given boot camp training. It was hard to stab something you couldn’t hit. Ranka had taken a leaf out of Yoruichi’s book and begun crouching in order to capitalize on her leg strength. She didn’t care if she looked stupid, down on all fours like some weird animal, so much as she cared that she wasn’t getting stabbed in the back again.

She growled when she slid against the ground, pressed her fingertips against the ground and pushed until her spine popped and the ground became sky. Backflipping had never been something she had figured out even before puberty and her own inherent laziness kicked in, so Ranka did it more often than she should have simply because it was fun for her.

So Ikkaku had frowned and put her up against seated officers.

Ranka died. Frequently and painfully, but she started memorizing the way they moved. Ikkaku called it ‘combat awareness’, and Ranka just called it what it was: hell.

Before they had even managed to go to bed for the evening, Kenpachi had made her tell him where the fight was. It was strange. She could tell Yachiru anything and everything, but if she even tried to tell anyone else, her throat would close up. Ranka had been forced to come up with some extremely roundabout methods to answer Kenpachi’s questions.

He didn’t even want to know anything really complicated.

Who should he kill, and who should he fight. Who would be the biggest challenge. When could he fight first. Easy things, but she couldn’t give him exact answers. So she told him a bunch of bullshit that would have made the Oracle of Delphi cry. Some kannagi she was.

The shooting star breaks when the bell tolls. Find the strongest and beware the weakest.

And if he messed up her cat, Ranka was going to claw his balls off when he least expected it. Unless Mama got to him first. Ranka had been very, very clear about that one. Leave her cat alone, or Kenpachi was going to meet her Mama and Mama would  _ end him _ in ways no man should ever experience.

None of that was a lie. Just because it required Yachiru’s crayons and a bunch of really terrible drawings did not make it any less valid.

And everything would have been fine if the alarm hadn’t sounded in the middle of her really awful match with the current twentieth ranked seated officer who was throwing her ass over teakettles around the training grounds.

(Yumichika had promised to get her a sword and a proper uniform at some point, but for now she would have to settle with the slightly blood stained remains of her fake uniform and her tiny little folding knife.)

The alarm sounded clear enough for her hearing aids to pick it up, and Ranka grit her teeth. Now was the time to show her stuff. If she was  _ right _ on this one, it would be the start of a beautiful fortune telling relationship with the Eleventh Division.

Ikkaku and Yumichika clearly had the same idea she did, because she barely had enough time to stand up straight before Yumichika leapt forward and threw her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes again. Ranka was really getting tired of getting manhandled like this.

“Nome-heichou, it’s going to get a bit unpleasant,” Yumichika warned as the sky began to glow. And Ranka simply cheered.

“Mama’s coming!” Yoruichi to the rescue! Ranka was jostled against Yumichika’s shoulder as they took to the roofs.

“We’re not really going to get deployed to fight your mother, kid.” Ikkaku spat out as they ran. “That’s just bad taste.”

Ranka ignored him and focused. “Sivka-Burka, mute speakers. Connect to group chat.” She winced as she heard shouting and the rush of wind from all her little connected devices. “Operator is online. Standing by for navigation services.”

“Ranka,” the wayward children exclaimed in various shades of shock.

“Hi hi! Sorry I’m late. I made some friends. No chance of course trajectory changes, defense advised.” She heard it before she saw the cannonball hit the membrane, and Ranka grinned. Everything was going according to the plot. Or at least, it should have been.

If she hadn’t shown up at the Eleventh, Ikkaku and Yumichika would have been skiving off somewhere. She only hoped their natural urges to keep away from the demon Ranka called her Mama would lead to an inevitable confrontation. And then she could meet up with Ichi-nii and stick to him like a particularly stubborn barnacle. Hopefully.

She’d kind of miss the bunch of drunk sword dorks that made up the Eleventh. When they weren’t drinking drain cleaner, they had good taste in booze. Ranka could appreciate that, even if she wasn’t allowed to drink much of it and had to stick with the same tea Yachiru had. Oh, Yachiru was going to be mad her friend was gone. But Ranka had given her the warning that Aizen Sousuke was a jerk who needed his face kicked in, so hopefully that would help.

Luck was  _ not _ on Ranka’s side.

They landed, split up into pairs that Ranka was relieved to know were entirely the same ones. She breathed a sigh of relief. “Sound off. Status please.”

“Sado, fine.”

“Yoruichi, make me proud little kannagi.”

“Uryuu… also fine. Fixing up Orihime.”

Ranka didn’t need to hear Ichigo check in, because she had literally gotten to watch him crash into a strange pit of instant sand with his even stranger companion. Seriously, not how she wanted to spend her evening. She didn’t breathe until she saw him come spitting out of the pit.

And then she remembered that she was currently balanced over Yumichika’s shoulder and Ranka sighed. The jump down from the roof was just as jarring as she thought it would be, and she coughed as her ribs were jostled. “Evasive maneuvers recommended.”

“Eh,” came the strange double voice of the translation in her hearing aids and Ichigo’s actual voice in her ears.

Of course Yumichika and Ikkaku had to pretend to be all badass. Which, in their case was less pretending and more of their status as  _ actual badasses _ that gave weight to their posturing. Yumichika even had the courtesy of setting her down behind him so he could form an impromptu barrier with Ikkaku.

“Nome-heichou, take cover,” Yumichika gave her a little push  while Ikkaku started doing his infamous Lucky Dance.

Except Ichigo, because of course it was Ichigo, ruined it all by pointing at her with a shout. He had even brushed up on his slow pronunciation and careful word choice, which Ranka appreciated. “Ranka! You’re here!”

She gave a little wave and did a few careful skips away from the quartet. “ Sivka-Burka, unmute microphone. Good morning, Ichi-nii.” Ranka gave a tiny bow and inclined her head up at Yumichika as she pointed at the stranger. “He’s getting away, sir.”

“Yes, thank you Nome-heichou. Be good for Ikkaku while I’m gone.” And now she was just left with Ichigo and Ikkaku. Shinigami moved with a purpose when they felt like it.

She backed away from the remaining two and gave a tiny wave as she settled in against a wall. “I’ll wait here.”

Ichigo frowned at Ikkaku, even as they went into some spiel about power levels and machismo that Ranka honestly couldn’t care less about. “Give me back Ranka.”

Ikkaku gave him his answer with the point of his sword. “She’s the Eleventh’s now!” Well that was nice. Ranka did so enjoy being treated like luggage.

She couldn’t help it, pushed herself off the wall and brushed her uniform off before she settled down to watch them fight. And it was educational right up until Ichigo went to wipe away the blood on his forehead and Ikkaku ‘cheated’.

“I’m saying that you’re too good to be dismissed as a lucky battle-crazed novice. Not like Nome-heichou over there. Who is your master, Ichigo?” Ranka was not aware that Ikkaku could get that serious. But she still took offense to being called a ‘lucky battle-crazed novice’. Ranka was not battle-crazed so much as battle-abstaining-but-being-forced. She hissed at him and flipped him off.

Ichigo snorted at her. At least her Ichi-nii still thought she was funny. “He only trained me for about ten days. So I don’t know if I can call him my master but… someone did teach me how to fight.” Ichigo slid into what Ranka’s inexpert mind could only call a ‘get ready to whoop some ass’ stance.

Ikkaku stared as Ranka started laughing. “Who?”

“Papa! Ichi-nii is Papa’s favorite student!” This was… stretching the truth of reality a bit too far in the name of her own amusement. Possibly.

Ichigo cleared his throat and looked uneasily at Ranka with her blood-stained coat. “Urahara Kisuke.”

At that point, Ikkaku whipped his head around to stare at Ranka and then back at Ichigo. “Her Papa?”

Ichigo nodded solemnly. “Her Papa. She’s probably going to grow up just like him.”

The two stared at each other, a moment of solidarity. Ikkaku cleared his throat. “Ah… have you… met her mother by any chance?”

“Mama is Mama!” Ranka was having far too much fun with using her limited Japanese to goad Ikkaku into a state of extreme panic.

For his part, Ichigo nodded slowly. “I… I have.”

“Well. I see. So he is your master. Then it would be disrespectful to kill you the easy way in front of his daughter. Watch carefully, kid. This is how zanpakuto fight! Extend, Houzukimaru!” Holy shit, Ikkaku was a certified badass. And whatever he did to make his sword turn into a new kind of whooping stick made her ears pop and her hearing aids shriek.

And everything was good until Ranka remembered that at some point, their fight ended up taking out buildings in the surrounding area. Frantically she started looking for some sort of cover and, as there was none to be found in the empty street, she curled up into a ball and simply went about her business.

“Sivka-Burka, call Yoruichi.” Ichigo and Ikkaku could work it out on their own. Right now she needed to talk to someone with sense. The call only rang for a moment before the cat picked up. “Hello, kitty-cat. Having fun?”

It was always so weird hearing such a manly voice come out of a woman turned into a cat. But she had strange tastes from the beginning, and Ranka had been very aware of that. “Ranka?”

“Mm. Ichi-nii is beating the tar out of Ikkaku, so I’ve got some free time.” She buried her face in her arms, knees up to her chest as she watched. “Hey, do you think I could pass on immortality?”

Yoruichi made a strangled sort of choking sound. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“Hmm… but it’s an immunity to a condition. You know… I’m about to have a guinea pig.” Fights in real life were infinitely faster than any shonen manga could ever portray. It didn’t hurt that both of the people involved in the fight were clearly well trained. It didn’t matter that Ranka’s involvement was limited to cheering from the sidelines, which she absolutely refused to do. She may have been stuck in the body of a small child, but that didn’t mean Ranka couldn’t have some dignity left.

Yoruichi sighed. “Do you even know how to do that?”

Ranka tilted her head and winced when Ichigo socked Ikkaku in the ribs. “... No. We’re going to make it up as we go along, yup.”

Not that it was going to matter. The outcome was already set in stone from the beginning, and there was no way under any sun that Ranka could change it. Ikkaku and Ichigo were contrary types, and it didn’t help that Ichigo was fighting not just for honor but because he thought that Ikkaku and Yumichika had  _ stolen _ her from him.

She could smell something dead and rotten, ash on the wind and blood on the ground. Something in Ichigo’s eyes gleamed golden. “Kitty-cat? I’m gonna have to call you back. Go have fun being murder ninja in the night. Such sneak, much wow.” She hung up manually with a satisfying series of taps that muted her side of the network so everyone could focus on their infiltrations. Ranka could still hear them, yammering away in her ears as she got to her feet and dusted the dirt and scraps of broken wall from her uniform. Considerate of Ichigo to blow up the wall across from her and not the wall she had huddled down at.

Ikkaku was down and out, bleeding and dying right in front of her. Now was the only time she would get the chance to test her theory. “Ichi-nii. Bring me his sword.”

“Ranka-” Her hand snapped up as she dropped to her knees to pillow Ikkaku’s head on her thighs. “Ranka what is going on?”

She grinned behind her mask and rummaged her little hand through her pouch. She had eight doses of her medicine before she was going to need to bother Yoruichi or perhaps make ‘friends’ with someone who had access to the esoteric chemicals that made up her green glowing medical salvation. But what she wanted wasn’t a full vial, oh no. Ranka wanted the empty one from that morning, with its sharp needle point and deceptively small metal body.

“Ranka what are you doing?” Ichigo held up Hozukimaru and squinted as it turned back into a proper sword. He shrugged and popped the cap from the end of the hilt to access the styptic salve within.

She shrugged and rolled up her sleeve, pulled the ribbon from her hair to make an impromptu tourniquet. Ranka had to pull of her mask in order to hold the silk tight with her teeth. She curled her finger into a fist and grit her teeth around the white silk. This was not going to be pleasant. But Ikkaku could die from this, his medicine be damned. With the gash on his arm and chest… she didn’t want to think about it.

It was easier to slip the needle into her vein, the thin green line that she could see through her skin and jam it in until the blood gushed out and welled in the palm of her hand. Ichigo slathered on the salve, and Ranka… Ranka held her hand above the gash that Ichigo hadn’t managed to get to yet and let her blood trickle down to splash in the wound.

Ichigo yelped. “Ranka! That’s unsanitary!” Whatever else he said was too fast for her software to pick up, and Ranka simply blinked as he stopped what he was doing to shove her hand away.

She glared at him and tried to keep from splashing everywhere. “Ichi-nii. I’m immortal. He is dying. Ikkaku is my friend.” Ichigo shut his mouth with a click and Ranka let out a sigh through her nose. She chewed the ribbon to pull it tighter, winced when it jostled the needle and tried not to whimper. Ranka could do this. The methodology was unsure, hypothesis not yet past the drawing board before she had thrown it into testing, and she wasn’t sure how to go about it. Did she need to drip it into the wound? Shove her silly straw into the hole and make an impromptu blood transfusion kit?

Ranka was not sure how to go about to this, but she’d be damned if she let Ichigo know it. She held her palm against Ikkaku’s mouth and let some of it dribble in, massaged his throat until he drank it in gasping gulps. Well, that seemed to be effective. Maybe she should just keep doing that.

Ikkaku took a breath that gurgled oddly, and Ranka pulled the ribbon so tight she saw stars and the blood ran out that much quicker when she clenched her fist. She was not going to let him die.

 

\----------

 

Ranka woke up in Ichigo’s arms, cradled on his lap while Ikkaku yelled at him. She didn’t know what either of them were saying, could only pick up choice words from the garble in her groggy haze. This wasn’t like when she had died the last time, no. Her mouth was drier than the Sahara and she coughed. Ichigo shrugged his shoulder and lifted an idle hand enough to hold up a single green vial. “Need it?”

She nodded and coughed, and Ichigo screwed the little vial in with practiced fingers. And then he reached up behind her ears and slipped her hearing aids back on, and the world came back in a rush of clarity. “Morning. You passed out on me. Yoruichi said he would talk to you later.” She wiggled until she was a bit more comfortable, and simply focused on breathing in the life saving medicine.

Seven more vials left. “Ika,” she mumbled tiredly as she started to succumb to the warmth feeling of calmness Ichigo cast over her. “Fine?”

There was a grunt somewhere to her left, and Ranka leaned over enough to lock eyes with one Madarame Ikkaku. One weirdly indignant Madarame Ikkaku with blood on his mouth and the tiniest blush on his cheeks. But he was breathing and not dying, and that was all that mattered.

Ichigo nodded. “He’s… alive. Somehow. I didn’t use all his medicine. But he is unhappy that we saved him.”

Ranka leaned forward, brows furrowed as she stared incredulously at Ikkaku. “Friends help.” She couldn’t make her voice any more deadpan as she stated what she thought was the most obvious fact of the universe, as then her software would be drowned out by her actual voice. So instead she settled for a vague hand motion that indicated the distance between Ranka and Ikkaku, threw up her hands like she didn’t understand anything at all, and glared with all her might.

Ichigo sighed against her hair. “Ranka. Stop. Be nice.”

Ikkaku made some aborted motion towards Ranka that made Ichigo bundle her up in his arms and twist her away from him. “That’s rich. Why the hell did you save me, kid? I was supposed to  _ die  _ and you took that away from me.”

Ranka tilted her head. “Dragon over Karakura. Spin. Spin. Spin. That’s why.” She tilted her head the other way and clapped her hands together. “The monsters are coming.” Vague enough her throat didn’t close up, but she choked through the specifics. “Bad kitty.”

Later, she would deny ever having called Grimmjow ‘bad kitty’. But for now it was enough.

Ichigo stood up, kept Ranka balanced on his hip and she clung to his neck in order to keep from falling. “I don’t really care how you feel. I just want the answers to a few questions.” He cracked his neck and bent down just far enough out of Ikkaku’s reach that Ranka dangled tantalizing like the worst bait. “But say thank you to Ranka first. She almost died for you.” Ichigo frowned at Ikkaku, and the man sighed.

“No one asked her to. It’s not like she can really die anyway.” Ranka blinked at the two of them, uncomprehending whatever variety of the Bro Code they were running on. Ikkaku raised his arm with a wince. “Kid. Come here.”

Ichigo did not want to let go, but Ranka had studied at the school of Yoruichi. She wiggled out of his grip like an overly floppy fish and took two whole steps forward. Ichigo tensed, and Ikkaku tilted his hand down to land solidly on the top of her head. He patted her a few times, and Ranka grinned behind her mask. “You did good, kid. Stay safe. Keep your big brother away from the Captain, all right?”

Ranka nodded and inclined her head so he could pat her better. “I will. Feel better, Mister Squid.”

He spluttered. “Squid? Hey! I’ll have you know my name has a great meaning-”

Ranka cut him off by swift application of an unmasked kiss to his forehead. “Be lucky. Be brave.”

Ichigo bundled her back up in his arms and tugged her out of the way of Ikkaku’s desperate broken lunge to strangle her. “Where’s Kuchiki Rukia?”

Ranka whipped out her phone and took notes on the route that Ikkaku grudgingly gave them, fingers tapping away. Straight south to the barracks, in the white tower at the west end. Not very complicated. She tapped away at her phone and pulled open her network. “Operator here. Target is at the barracks. White tower at the west end. Proceed with extreme caution.”

She didn’t wait for a response before she looked down at Ikkaku’s betrayed face. “You’re… with them? On his team?” Ikkaku sounded like the world had bottomed out. “You’re… a traitor to the Eleventh.”

Ichigo frowned and Ranka laughed, a tiny little harsh sound in the stillness. “Childish. This is war. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. You may not understand it now but you will. There is no black and white. Only shades of grey. You’re my friend. That means I will save you too.”

He didn’t understand. “You’re one of us, and you lied to us.”

Ranka tilted her head. “Yes. But I belong to the Eleventh. I won that. I died for that. I’ll die for you. Again. Again. Again. I promised. We are friends.” She patted Ichigo’s cheek with the hand that wasn’t clamped to her side by Ichigo’s arms. “He is my friend. You are my friend. I exist to change things. I think. Maybe. I could be wrong.” She clicked her tongue. “I don’t know what else to do. I owe him. I owe you. So. I am going to die for you. As many times as it takes to change the world.”

Ichigo stood up and bowed. “I’ll keep her safe. Even if it’s from herself.” Rude of him to assume she needed saving. Really, dying didn’t hurt so much any more. She had a handle on this. Most of the time the people she ended up getting murdered by were even nice enough to make it a clean and merciful kill, so she didn’t even really have any complaints.

“I don’t need that! Oy, Ichigo. Keep that little idiot from being a martyr!” Ikkaku rolled around, scraping the salve onto the ground even as Ichigo straightened up and turned to walk away. “You stay away from my Captain. He’ll kill you to get her back. Little idiot told our entire division that she knows the future. She’s like a cheat guide for all the fun fights.”

Her Ichi-nii frowned down at her. “What did you do something that stupid for? Idiot.”

Ranka sniffed imperiously from behind her mask, nose turned away from either of them. “War is coming. I’m playing this game my way. Everyone else had a head start.”

Both of them blinked at her. “A game? You think this is a game? People are going to die and you think this is a game?” Ichigo couldn’t hold back his anger and barked down at her, spoke so fast that her software had to struggle to keep up. “Take this seriously, Ranka! These are people’s  _ lives _ you’re playing with!”

“The current estimated number of living souls is in excess of six billion. The current number of shinigami in the Soul Society is an estimated two thousand. What happens to the world of the living if all those soul reapers die?” They didn’t all die, but Ichigo didn’t need to know that. He had to understand. She had to  _ make him _ understand what was at stake. “Stop being a child! The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. This is war. I did not start it, but I will finish it.”

She hit him in the ribs, a deft poke combined with a wiggle that lasted until her feet touched the ground. Ranka kicked him in the shin for good measure.

“Ranka-chan… that’s lonely.” Orihime’s voice crackled over the network, and Ranka went cold. She had forgotten to mute herself. Rookie mistake. “We’re your friends,too.”

Yoruichi hissed. “Children should be children. As if any of us will let a  _ child _ die for us. Be a good girl and keep your head down. Stay with Ichigo.”

Ranka did not enjoy being carried around like a sack of potatoes, but that seemed to be her default state of being when dealing with everyone taller than her. Yoruichi murmured over the network, curbed her rage and tried to speak sensibly. “Ranka. You’ve painted a big enough target on your back. Let it go.”

Ichigo gripped his zanpakuto in one hand and a tiny child on his shoulder with the other. “Well, you heard the cat. We’re not going to let you do it. So you can just give it up.”

She at least had enough arm room to wave to Ikkaku as Ichigo ran off into the night, and she grinned when he sat up enough to wave properly. Experiment successful, so she at least had that going for her.

Her immortality could be transferred, even if it was just the once, as long as she could stuff whoever was dying full of enough of her blood to trick the effects into working for her instead of against her like it normally did. The possibilities that information presented were nearly endless.

She could save the ones who mattered without dying to do it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Ranka's Death Toll:**  
>  **Training with Ururu:** 5  
>  **Urahara's medical experimentation:** 2  
>  **Hollow related shenanigans:** 1  
>  **Physics:** 1  
>  **Kenpachi Zaraki:** 1  
>  **Shinigami related:** 6  
>  **Total:** 16
> 
> **Deaths Kurosaki Ichigo has seen:** 2  
>  **Death Kurosaki Ichigo could have prevented:** 2

**Author's Note:**

> As always, any questions, concerns, or comments can be directed to either the comment box below or to my tumblr over at lacelich.
> 
> A playlist is available [here.](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt8TKIwj5EM2-ciz7xP-nnJZkFv7VAi5V)


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